Yesterday Jennifer from Buck Naked Farm came by and she and I moved bees from my top bar hives into her traditional Langstroth style hives. The weather, which had looked questionable turned out to be just perfect and the bees behaved surprisingly well considering we tore apart and restored their entire homes. The whole process felt like moving into the dorms the first year of college. Lots of organized chaos.
Comb cut from top bars and rubber handed into frames
We had to take the fully built out comb from the top bar hives and cut it to fit into the traditional frames. In this picture you can se the drone comb on the right where the comb is built bigger than the rest. This is something you don’t see in a Langstroth hive because the wax is already drawn and the bees use the size that is provided. This is part of what is attractive about a top bar hive, it lets the bees do what comes natural to them. The down side of the top bar hives is we had to combine two hives that were not going to make it, and rehive another hive that probably wouldn’t have made it through the winter either. Three out of four hives didn’t have a chance. The hives they are in now will allow for much more management and a better success rate for the bees. Maybe they won’t be fulfilled emotionally, but they will be alive, so that’s something.
Jennifer working on the first hive after combining two hives into one.The bees in their new home. They are already hitting the buffet Jennifer put in there for them.Final checks of the bees before putting the lid onThe bees, in their shiny new homes
Here you can see the Langstroth hives in the foreground, and the old top bar hives right in the background.
The one top bar hive that is left
We chose to leave the strongest hive in place as they seem to be doing very well. Everyone else was moved to new digs and given sugar water. Next week when we check on the rest of the bees and refill the feeders, we’ll also break open this hive and take a look inside to make sure of how they are doing.
We have soap and honey IN STOCK. I’ve been talking about it forever but we finally have it here.
The sales room now smells awesome with the soap sitting here. I’m definitely keeping this stuff around from now on. This soap is from the lady, Jennifer, who will be doing our beekeeping going forward. She will be transferring our bees over to her hives this week and bringing more bees to our farm so that we can finally have all the honey we can use (I hope!)
In addition to beekeeping, she’s been buying my lard over the years and making soap with it. Since her soap looks SO much better than mine, as in it’s actually packaged, had a label, etc, I asked her if she would let me sell some of her soap in our store and she agreed. What you see here is soap made from the lard of our pigs, along with all the other oils and fragrances that make great soap. I know they are different recipes so I don’t know what ratio which one has but these are the real deal. If you want to read more about what they do and how they do it, check out their new farm website, Buck Naked Farm.
Certified NC local honey, the real deal.
In addition to the soaps, we also have an initial order of honey on hand. This honey isn’t from our bees yet, it’s from Jennifer’s bees who live in the mountains of NC. I of course scammed a bottle for myself to taste and it is better than the honey I extracted myself. I’m sure our honey will improve with Jennifer’s ministrations but for now we are blessed to have this honey on hand. Hopefully we’ll get a bit of honey from our farm when we move the bees. Next year we should definitely have honey and honey going forward as well.
You’ll also note that besides having labels, everything is very well presented. When you see what I’ve displayed, it is all white, cold, and without style. Jennifer walked in with not only product, but displays, signs, baskets, flowers, and all the things that make it obvious a woman has been here. I know I’ve been meaning to get some color in our room, but I didn’t know how badly it needed it till I saw her displays. I’ve gone to work on it though, we’ll have some stuff on the walls shortly.
I noted when I logged onto the WordPress dashboard that my post count had reached 666. Not a good number.
I thought to myself, “Self, you should do a quick post just to get off that number.” Then I wandered off and did farming stuff and let it sit for a few days. I had plenty of stuff to post, but there were pigs to treat, produce to pick up, things to do. You know how it is. Then yesterday while I was having my truck worked on (my brand new truck that I’ve already broken), I checked my email and saw that our site was down. I called support and they said, “Um yeah, it looks like we have an issue on our end.” I made mention of the fact that this was the third “issue” in about as many months and it had me down hard which in the hosting world is pretty bad. The answer was, “Well, you are on a pretty old server. You should upgrade to a new server.” After some back and forth, it came to be that upgrades are something that I need to ask about, that they don’t just migrate you on their own. Turns out that I would pay less for a newer setup. I just had to do the transfer myself. I thought doing my own transfer was odd since I know that hosting companies will transfer for you when you switch providers but whatever, I just rebuilt the entire site, I should be able to do it.
Long story short, two days of work in my off hours, and working on the site with tech support since about 4am this morning, we are back online. If you see anything broken, please let me know.
No more tempting Ol’ Scratch. Let’s move on towards 1000.
Most importantly, this is post 667. No more tempting the devil.
The first is in the freezers. I took 5 pigs to the processor a couple of weeks ago and all that product is back and in the freezers. I had a few of you request to know when the pork was in and I’m finally getting around to posting something. Sorry.
We are LOADED with pork products, including the BBQ that everyone was asking for. I’ll be on the farm this afternoon so just give me a call (919)810-2530 or email at dan@ninjacowfarm.com to schedule a time to get by.
The second kind of pork is less tasty but much cuter.
Baby Large Black pigs, just born and snuggled up together
One of our Large Black sows has had a litter of piglets this past Friday. She had six in total.
Mom with her new llitter
One was born with a really large gash on his neck which we’ve been treating. First we had to get all the dirt out which required flushing the wound repeatedly over a couple of days. Then yesterday Spork and I took a little extra time after feeding and brought him out for some home surgery.
All sewn up.
It certainly wasn’t the kind of stitching that I prefer (Hi Katie!) but it was serviceable for what we were doing. And considering he was squirming the whole time wanting to get back with his brothers and sisters to get warm, it was ok. Another flush of the wound, then iodine, then stitches, then Alushield. We also gave him a small injection of Liquimyacin to stave off any infection. That will likely require a follow up shot in a few days. Till then we’ll flush the wound daily (I left it open top and bottom). If he makes it a week, he should be good. That’s more than I can say for his siblings as it looks like mom sat on two of them and killed them.
I mentioned already that I was gone this past week but I didn’t say where. Once again I was at gunsmithing school at Montgomery Community College. This was my last class for the year and it was the easiest of the bunch. Basic custom installations. Things like installing butt pads, sling swivels, sight bases, lapping scope rings, etc.
However it was taught by the head of the program who recently retired after 30 years so there was some pressure to show up and perform well. I only took two guns with me to this class. One of my own and one that belonged to someone else that needed some work that matched nicely with this class.
A Tikka rifle in need of a butt pad
This is the gun I was working on for someone else. He already had a butt pad but wasn’t sure how to grind it to fit without messing up the stock. He also had a sling swivel that had pulled out of the gun and needed to be repaired.
Butt pad, ground to fit
The final product. Since the butt pad was already mated up to the gun, all I had to do was grind to fit which made my job pretty easy compared to everyone else who had to fill in screw holes, cut stocks for length of pull, etc, etc. I was done in about 30 mins whereas everyone else worked for about 1.5 days. Having already ground stocks and butt pads before certainly helped as well. In fact, after listening to the instruction, I basically wandered off on my own and did the whole job, then wandered back in and boxed the gun up, done. It does pay to have experience.
Delivering to the customer, butt pad installed and sling swivel repaired
The proof is in the pudding so I was curious to see how he reacted. The result? Two thumbs up!
My rifle being drilled and tapped for scope bases
The other project gun I brought was one I’d been tinkering with for quite a while. It was actually the first gun I ever owned, a Marlin model 25 bolt action .22. A few years ago I’d pulled the gun from the stock, and the barrel from the received and then cut and threaded the barrel for a screw on suppressor. The gun didn’t have any sling swivel studs so I brought it for class. It also didn’t have scope mounts so I was able to drill and tap the received for scope mounts. It turned out that for the class they were demonstrating how to use a jib for drilling and tapping because most gunsmiths don’t have a mill. I’m not most gunsmiths so I requested that we drill and tap mine on the mill. Unfortunately that took the new head of the program to demonstrate so I had to wait till he was available. Finally on the last day, he got free and we dialed in my action and drilled and tapped the scope mounts. Being familiar with machining jobs, it was fairly basic. Like most gunsmithing operations it was all about dialing in to make sure everything was in line with the action so the scope is straight. We discussed dialing in off of various surfaces on the action but in the end picked the grooves cut into the action for the original scope as they seemed the most true. We located our edges, located center, and then drilled and tapped away. A few minutes later and we had everything done.
Now this gun is on my bench at home waiting on some new parts. Then it’ll go back together and back in the stock with its new sling swivels. Then I just have to get off my butt and finally fill out my Form 1 to get permission from the ATF to make the suppressor and the project I started years ago will finally be done.
Once we had the cow back in the pasture, I put the jigsaw puzzle of boards back together, which is harder than it sounds, and got back to something normal. The cow went into the woods of this pasture and started bellowing non-stop. Something was definitely wrong. It was like she was searching for something but maybe she thought the other cows would have been there and now they were not. I talked to Miguel (he just happened to call in the middle of all this) and he thought maybe she’s had a calf and the calf had wandered into this paddock by accident? Spork and I went into the pasture to check on her and that’s when I found out the truth.
Her ear tag read #25, not #33.
Now it makes sense. #25 had lost her calf on Friday and we’d had to move the cows on the same day. Even though we’d left #25 in the paddock with her calf and the calf had passed away while she was in there, she wasn’t over it yet. She obviously had escaped the other pasture and come back to this pasture looking for her calf, which was pretty sad. Now she was finally in the pasture and couldn’t find him because we’d already buried him back at the home farm.
Spork and I went around the pasture she was in tightening up boards, removing brush, etc. Basically making sure she’d stay in the pasture she was in and not escape back to the other pasture where the cows were. Then we went to the other pasture to fix wherever she’d gotten out. We fixed 4-5 places that weren’t too bad but nowhere that it appeared she had escaped. I guess when a mom is after her baby, no fence is going to keep her.
With everything settled, we walked the mile back to the truck to get it off Percy’s land. That’s when we found that although I’d driven it in, I couldn’t drive it out. We couldn’t make the turn around some of his trees with the truck and trailer and we were basically trapped. It took us a few extra minutes and the blazing of a new trail, but we eventually got out.
It was now 10:30 and we were about to start our day. Only 100+ pigs to feed. Just another day on the farm.
So with this cow walking up and down the fence, I figured the only thing to do was to take a section of fence down and give her a hole to walk through. Fortunately, part of the fencing was board fence so with the right tools, it’s not too bad to disassemble and reassemble.
I left Spork to keep an eye on the cow and high tailed it back to the farm to grab hammer, nails, crow bar, and the nail puller. When I got back, the cow was still pacing. We had about 1.5 minutes on each lap of the pacing so I immediately went to work on pulling boards, trying to open a hole before she got back. I’d made it about 50% of the way when she showed back up. Before she got remotely close she decided she didn’t like what we were doing and turned and headed off through the neighbors back yard and towards Old Stage Road, about a mile away.
Spork and I took off to head her off, which she took as a sign that she should run instead of walk. With Spork running I jumped in the truck and speed backed (with a trailer) down the curvy dirt road. I met up with Spork and the cow as we entered Percy Johnson’s property. You may remember Percy, his farm played a role in the original Ninja Cow story. We walked the cow around, in and out of his paddocks till the cow noticed the horses in one area. She thought maybe they would be friendly so she headed over to them.
Our errant cow finally stops for a second. The only picture we got of this adventure.
That gave us a chance to finally get her turned back around and walking back towards the original paddock. With some encouragement, we finally got her back to pacing the paddock, trying to find a way in again. I went back to tearing off boards as fast as I could and after her walking a couple more laps, I had a hole big enough for her to walk through, which on the next lap, she did. Phew!
However, that wasn’t the end of the story, unfortunately. But that will be for the next post.
Sunday Spork and I were running the farm. Step one is always to feed the cows first as this greatly reduces the chance of bloat. The cows are at the neighbors so I loaded up the trailer with food, picked up Spork, and headed over. We’d gotten an early start, the day was crisp and cool, and things were going great. With Sporks help we unloaded the produce quickly and loaded back up to head back to the farm. Only 7 paddocks worth of pigs to feed and we’d have everyone fed for the day. Plus Miguel and Adam had pre-loaded our bins for us so most of our work was done. As we pulled away from the cows I was already planning what I’d be doing the rest of the day after we finished feeding the pigs.
That’s when I saw a cow out. Our neighbors setup is two separate 6 acre pastures. We had moved the cows from the first 6 acres to the second last week. What I saw was a cow trying to get back into the first pasture, walking up and down the fence in the neighbors yard.
“Maybe it’s not my cow.”
Upon closer look, I recognized the ear tag as one of mine. I thought maybe she’d been left in the paddock when we moved everyone else and when she found out she was alone, she’d jumped the fence but couldn’t find her way to the other cows. We followed her into the woods and as she went by Spork I asked him what her number was. #33 he responded. Weird. 33 is a good cow and hasn’t caused any problems. After looking the pasture over, we realized there was no way to get the cow back in as the fencing was completely secure. What to do?
In all my running around lately I wasn’t sure exactly when I was going to be able to pick our grapes. I love getting our grapes each year. The kids, like most American kids, have no idea about seasonality when it comes to food. They can have apples in February, bananas by the bunch whenever, watermelons in April with no thought to how unnatural it is to have this things out of season.
However, we only have muscadine grapes once per year and that makes it special. I look forward to juicing grapes, picking with the family, etc. all year so I was a sad when I received this last week.
Our kids and friends with the first harvest of grapes
Our kids and their friends had done the first picking and had made juice. I was sitting in gun smithing school in Troy, NC and had missed it. Oh well. The kids are always so excited for grapes that they pick them early so not a big of a deal. I don’t need green grape juice. It’s bitter!
When I got home, I found that the grapes were just getting good for picking indeed I had not missed anything. That meant that this weekend it was time to get busy. The trouble was, I had so much else going on when would I get to it?
Enter Grandma to save the day. While I was working on the farm, Grandma came over and got all the kids outside and busy picking.
Grandma and Spork hard at work.
By the time I made it over to the grape vines, they were nearly finished.
Well, almost everyone was helping. Wildflower decided to dig a hole instead.
Spork and I went back with another pot and cleaned up the grapes that anyone under 6′ couldn’t reach, which ended up being a lot of grapes but nowhere as many as they had already picked.
Grape harvest, 2015
I still have one and a quarter rows to clean up but this is the bulk of what we got this weekend. All of these will be juiced tonight making everyone, including mom, very happy. Once the juice is gone, it’s gone till next year but while it’s here, it’s awesome.
Back in July I noted that #25 had had a new little calf, #56. This calf received all the normal care we offer, which frankly isn’t that much. The moms do the work of raising the calves unless there is a problem. We had noted a couple of issues with this pair though.
1. #25 would let other calves nurse her even though they were not her calves. She made no effort to kick other calves off as she should but #56 was nursing as well..
2. #56 seemed pretty lazy. We sometimes had to move him to the next paddock where the other calves would run in on their own.
It seemed that while his peers were doing well, #56 wasn’t thriving however when I left to go out of town last Sunday, he was doing fine. When I got home Friday, we moved the cows and noted that #56 wasn’t with the rest of the cows. His mother was at the front of the line apparently oblivious to his absence so we went into the woods to look for him. I found him in the shade, laying down and looking bedraggled. His breathing appeared somewhat labored and he was definitely weak. My immediate thought was dehydration, probably from not nursing mom.
#56, with mom in the background.
We went ahead and moved the other cows into the new paddock, keeping mom and two accidentally kept calves with #56 in the old paddock. This would help with the competing calves nursing and give this guy a chance. Mom was quite distraught, calling for the cows in the other paddock and not seemingly very worried about her calf still in the paddock. The two extra calves thought this was a grand adventure and had lots of fun being out from under Uno (mom number 1) and Sprinkles (mom number 2’s) thumb. The mom’s standing at the corner of the new pasture hollering for their calves were not nearly as pleased.
With everyone sorted out, we tried to let the calf nurse and #25 stood there for a minute to give him a chance but he would not nurse.
Calf trying to nurse but giving up
I then took Pedialite in a bottle and tried to get him to nurse. He drank a bit but no much. Then I switched to Pedialite in a syringe and was able to get about 150ccs in him. I gave him a break and then came back in about 1.5 hours. I got another 120ccs in him then another break, then I was able to get about 160ccs in him. During this time I also gave him a shot of 1cc of Banamine to help him feel better. All the while he was looking pretty bad. I went to lunch to give him time for a break and for the medicine and fluids to do what they could.
Immediately after lunch I came back and found that the little calf had passed away.
#56 in the truck. He was buried on the home farm where he was born.
In reflection, this calf had not been strong since he was born and his mother nursing anyone who came by as opposed to kicking them off as she should certainly didn’t help him. This is the second calf that #25 had lost and that’s 2 for 2. She is a purchased cow, full blooded Angus. Her sister died on me last year. I think it’s safe to say that we have a bad bloodline here. #25 will be coming to a freezer near you as soon as I can arrange the processor and the space in the freezer.
“Love your children, forgive your enemies. Do neither for your cows.”
Every time I don’t follow that advice I’m shown it was correct. Had I culled #25 when she lost that first calf, her replacement would already be calving a healthy calf. It’s one strike and your out around here.
