Faaarrrmmm livin' is the life for me...

It's been over a month since I've blogged, but the truth is I don't have any energy left after a day spent watching my two-year-old twins and trying to get various farming projects off the ground.

My latest preoccupation has been with a box of baby chicks I bought last month, which has now grown into 26 rapidly fattening young chickens. The prior tenants of our coops, five old crabby hens and a neurotic rooster, haven't been particularly welcoming to the newcomers. I'd been bringing the chicks inside onto our porch evenings until last night, but they are unbelievably stinky creatures at this point. So I've rigged an elaborate but unsteady partition inside the coop.

When I first checked on the chicks, they had all crushed close to the door because they were so scared of the other chooks. But I made a point of putting about half of them onto the roosts and they made it through the night. Now it's pissing down rain on them and they're afraid to go back into the coop, so they're just getting drenched, and there's the added complication of my son's pet rabbit being very much in the mood for love-- he's mounting all the hens.

This week also marked my maiden foray into the world of beekeeping. The instructions for installing a queen into a package of bees couldn't be more simple--at least until you've opened the package and there are 8000 stinger-laden insects buzzing around you. You are supposed to remove a tiny cork, which allows the queen to chew her way out of about an inch of a candy-like substance. The time it takes her to emerge gives the workers a chance to get used to her scent, so they won't kill her when she shows up.

I managed to make a mess of both installations. With the first hive, I dropped the queen's cage into the box almost immediately, and had to reach into the wriggling swarm to fish her out. And I completely balled up the second installation, pushing the cork right into the queen's cage. I didn't crush her (I think), but now there's the risk that she emerged too early and has already been stung to death by her fickle workers. There seems to be a good deal of activity in the hive. Workers are coming and going and returning to the hive waddling under the weight of all the pollen on their legs, so I'm thinking things may be going just fine. But I'm going to consult with a fellow novice beekeeper by the weekend.

I know there's wars and scandals and all sorts of problems with the world, but for the moment I can only focus on children, bees, baking bread and chickens. It's kind of nice, really.