Bees and morels

Today began with checking on the chicks and ducklings.  As I held little Coyote (the blue female runner duck), I looked out the window to see the sky darkening ominously.  I told her that we'd probably get a storm today.  Before the words had left my lips, the skies opened up and dumped a tremendous amount of water on us.  We've had a rainy Spring,  but I haven't seen rain like that since our trip to North Carolina last July... it was incredible.  Honeybunch and I sipped our coffee on the front porch to the crack and rumble of thunder.

As the day went on, I grew anxious for the fact that our bees had not yet arrived.  I called the apiary to make sure they were coming, and he said they'd shipped a day late and should be here by the end of the day tomorrow.  I contented myself with planting rosebushes (thanks Katari!) and blackberries (thanks Herr Burmeister!), hauling away sod, and practicing with my firehoop for Saturday night's performance.  Around 5:00pm, my phone rang.

We picked the honeybees up at the post office right after they called to alert us to their arrival, armed with a spray bottle of sugar syrup.  The postman had his wife and son there checking the bees out, they were as fascinated as we were!

We brought them home, sprayed them generously with sugar syrup again, and let them rest in the barn for a bit over two hours.  Those little ladies on the outside of the box had been clinging to it throughout their journey, as there were no holes in the wire to be seen.

We installed the bees into their new home at dusk without incident.  I made one error, accidentally poking the wooden plug at the "non candy end" of the queen's cage into her enclosure, making a hole through which she could immediately exit.  We found a suitable sized stick to reseal that hole so the workers could eat their way in and have time to accept her as queen before her release. 

As we worked, the little ladies were crawling all over us, licking the sticky sugar syrup from our hands and exploring their new digs.   It went smoothly, and it was fun to see the girls get right down to work, clearing out the dead bees that came out of the box with them and crawling all over the queen's cage and the frames.

While walking in the beautiful woods in the rear of our property... 

Honeybunch found this:

It was a little one, so he put a jar over top of it to let it grow a bit before we harvest.  Tomorrow, we conduct a proper search for its kin... where there's one, there's more.  I cannot believe we have morel mushrooms growing on our land... as if this place needed to be any more perfect!  When we were looking for a home and talking about what we wanted, we'd always add on at the end... "...and it would be nice if there was a good morel patch somewhere too, but that's too much to hope for".  I guess we've been proven wrong!