Catching Up

I know that I have no excuse, since I sit around all day and twiddle my thumbs.  I'll try to be more diligent at getting my pics up here. 

Here's a recap of the last WEEK for folks who may find it interesting:

Here are the children picking the last of the sour cherries.  We ended up with about 14 quarts of pie filling on top of 14 pints of jam.  It's not the most we've had, but look at that tree!  It's not very big!

We put up a roadside stand for a few days.  We sold jam, pickled beets, fresh bread, eggs, and homemade soap.  The idea was fun, but we didn't have time to make a proper sign, and had a total of two customers in four days.  With all the other things to do around here, I just couldn't swing the roadside stand on top of the rest of it.  However, we'll give it another shot once we have sweet corn to sell along with the other goodies.

Dan's dad gave us an old bee hive a while ago, and we finally got around to having a local beekeeper look it over and give us advice.  He offered us a great bargain on a starter hive and told us how to clean up this hive and make it useable.  So we got to work:

Then someone else gave us a much newer, nicer, already-clean and ready-to-go hive.  And someone gave us money to buy bees, and so we did!  And our beekeeper friend gave us a suit, a helmet and net, and a smoker to boot.  Here are are friendly bees in their starter hive:

When they get settled in here and fill this box in, then we'll begin stacking our other supers (bee boxes) on top. Pretty pink hive... :)

I'll catch up more tomorrow. I have to get everyone in bed and dream of beans tonight...