Top Bar Hive Installation of Bees

And the bees have been installed.  Bees bee-haved and got into the hive.  Kids behaved watched from a distance.  Here are some photos taken by me and lady Genevieve of the process.  At 4 years old, I must admit that the girl has some photography skills already.  Check out our you tube video for the beginning to end installation (not great resolution as our camera is quite old).

Redwoodshire Top Bar Hive Bee Installation 2017

The Laird & Lady of Redwoodshire opening package of bees- armed & ready for installation

Watching and waiting for install to finish

Package of Bees Pre-Installation

Package of bees after Installation- remaining bees will make their way into the hive

Top Bar Hive from Bee Thinking

Making their way into the hive

Feeling good about our package installation

The Laird thinks he saw some worker bees within the Queen cavity when he installed the Queen cage.  This is causing him some concern- as the worker bees are supposed to eat away at the candy plug and get acclimated to the queen and her pheromones.  This takes a couple days to do, and then the risk of the workers killing the queen is low.  He likes to worry things.  I tend to take the path of less worry, and just waiting to see what happens.  The sun peaked out for the first time in days today, which is promising for our installation.  

We minimized the top bar space to about 11 bars, so that the bees can keep warm and work on filling this space.  Some bars are empty brood comb.  Some bars are capped honey.  And then we included some empty top bars for them to start fresh upon.  

Really excited to have bees back at Redwoodshire.  With our hive loss last month, it just felt like something was missing.  And it was.  Had the colony survived, this would be an exciting time to be observing their activity.  They love the dandelions and early blooming flowers.  This colony has a little head start with a number of bars of comb already drawn for brood, and some bars of honey to eat until they get established.  

Bees are pretty amazing creatures, and I look forward to observing them this season and hopefully seeing them through next winter.  I love sharing what I know and have already learned about beekeeping with those who are interested.  

In other news, I just ordered a few candle molds & supplies from Mann Lake.  The friends we acquired our swarm from last Spring are moving and have offered to give us a trash bag of beeswax! I am really looking forward to learning how to make some candles from all this wax we will have on hand.  This will likely be an activity for late summer or Fall, as I have a lot of processing of wax to tackle first.  Initially, I have to let spread our crushed wax comb out on pans and let the new bees clean all the residual honey off it.  They do an amazing job.  Then I will set up our homemade solar wax melting system to both filter & melt the wax down to solid pieces.  After that I will be ready to get my candle making on!  I got 3 different molds to work with.  I am hoping to make some gifts from this beeswax.  

JUST IN! The BEES have arrived

3# package of bees is equivalent to about 10,000 bees & 1 queen

We just got back from the Post Office, where we picked up our new package of honey bees.  Last year, we were fortunate to obtain a swarm of bees from the Laird's friend.  He caught the swarm in a cardboard nucleus box-  we picked them up- dumped them into our hive.  Easy peasy.  Slightly different process for ordering a 3# package of bees.  We were unsure which post office the bees would arrive at for pick up.  When would they call?  Lots of unknowns.  I signed up for text message tracking of our package, and was able to follow the bees journey that way.  The post office called me a hour ago, and off we went.  They were waiting for us on the front counter- all ready to come to Redwoodshire.  The bees look excellent, so far as we can tell.  There are only a handful of dead bees on the bottom of the box- which is a good sign.  Now we will wait until later this afternoon/ evening to install the package into our Top Bar Hive.  This is the preferred time to install packages of bees is during the evening, so that the bees have time to get oriented to their new home.

Another difference between a wild swarm of bees and a package of bees that you purchase is the queen.  A swarm comes with it's own queen- a queen that it knows and it part of it's genetic line.  With commercial bee production, the queens are produced and then packaged in a little cage with a candy plug.  The bees don't know their queen.  They just get paired up and set off.  The candy plug acts serves to slowly acclimate the queen to her new colony.  The worker bees eat away at the candy plug, and then during the time, the queens pheromones are recognized by the workers and they have that time to get accustomed to each other.  The worker bees would attack and kill the queen if there isn't sufficient time for acclimation.
The kids are as excited as us to have bees again.  They are so fascinating to observe.

If interested, stay tuned for the package installation into our Top Bar Hive which we will be doing later this afternoon.  Posts to follow.  We will likely contribute various other posts throughout the season, with inspection and how they are doing.

Changes of Landscape- Unplanned & Planned

Last month, our area was hit with the strongest windstorm that this area has seen in years.  It did damage to many trees in the area, and caused loss of power for thousands.  We survived the storm without any major damage, and only loss power while they shut it off to do repair work elsewhere.   The first night of power loss was actually sort of fun, as we lit some candles, played guitar and sang songs, and went to bed early.   We heat with a wood stove, so we had heat throughout the 30 hours of power loss, which was wonderful.  Though none of our trees fell, we noticed that one of our pine trees, seemed to be tilted more than normal.  Upon closer inspection, we noticed the base of the tree was cracked.  Though the tilted tree looked a bit silly, it was still standing.  

The weather has been unseasonably cold and rainy for May, so we did not go outside to play today.  When the Laird went out back to weatherproof  the roof of our Top Bar Hive, in preparation for the arrival of our bees tomorrow, he discovered a very changed landscape!  That old pine tree, that we hung our hammock from during the past 3 summers, was no longer tilted or standing.  It was sprawled across our lawn!  He came back into the house to get me to come and see the changed landscape of our yard.  My first thought was that there had been another "chicken massacre"-as the last time he came into the house declaring ominous news, it was 2 incidents in one week where we had lost a chicken to a predator- likely a hawk and a fox.  Not this time.  Just the tree.  

 In other news, we found an old Jungle Gym play set on craigslist a few weekends ago. This change to the landscape was planned.  The kids are at the perfect age for a play set, but we hadn't quite found the right one.  We were also intimidated at the prospect of having to disassemble, transport and then re-assemble a play set.  So we've been sitting on this hope for some time.  This particular jungle gym was a great deal, that included the generous service of moving it in one piece (minus the slides) and transporting it to Redwoodshire.  Once the seller offered to help transport the thing in one piece, I was sold.  What kind people they were.  I have always had wonderful luck meeting wonderful sellers on craigslist.  The whole process was so easy because they had a trailer and were willing to help us out moving the monster of jungle gym.  The only drawback is that we aren't quite happy with it's location and will be looking to move it back towards the woods.  That will be a challenge for another day.  Though the weather has been lousy- cold & rainy- the couple times we have been able to play on the jungle gym, the kids have both built up their confidence to go down the slides.  We do need to re-paint and sand a bit to help smooth some of the splintery edges- which we will tackle as the weather gets drier.  

As for now, the Laird has a new task before him of cutting this pine tree up and clearing it from the yard, in time for our annual Memorial Day party in a few weeks.  Sadly we won't be able to enjoy the shade of this particular tree any longer & we have to find a new place to hang out hammock.  On a brighter note, the blueberries will receive many more hours of sunlight, and be more productive now that this tree is no longer standing.  And the pool should get a little more sun too.  This change of landscape will take a bit of time to get used to, but we are thankful that it didn't fall on anything and cause any structural damage!

Beekeeping Updates- 1st Redwoodshire Honey Harvest

A fun learning experience for the whole family

We're approaching the one year mark of being beekeepers.  We got our swarm in May of last year and enjoyed watching our bees build their comb and do their thing.  The colony seemed to survive through the winter, as they were out flying during some of the unusually warm days we had in February.  Then we got blasted with a bunch of wind and snow during March.  And then our bees were no more.  Totally gone.  A very, very sad reality.  This past weekend, we opened our hive to harvest honey for the first time.  We took some photos of the Top bars and dead bees to see if we can deduce what may have happened to our colony.

Cutting honey comb into the bucket

Capped honey & empty brood cells

This honey harvest is one we've been looking forward to since we got our bees last Spring.  It was quite easy considering we had no bees to work with, and just got to go into the hive, pull out the top bars of honey and cut the comb off into our buckets.  Sad as our loss was, we enjoyed dipping our fingers in the crushed honey comb for that fresh honey.  This kept the kids busy while we examined the hive and worked on cutting the comb from the top bars.  We harvested 8 top bars of honey.

DIY Crush & Strain bucket system

We built a 2 bucket crush & strain system for our honey harvest.  Here's a video of how we made our Crush & Strain Bucket System.  We used 2 buckets & lids.  The top bucket has a bunch of small holes, close together drilled into a circle at the center of the bottom of the bucket. The bottom bucket lid has a large hole cut into the center.  We also installed our own honey gate about 1 inch from the bottom of the lower bucket.  Then we placed a 5 gallon paint strainer in the top bucket and placed the honey comb inside that.  We placed the honey comb into the top bucket, inside the paint strainer.  Then we used a potato masher & knife to crush the comb and release the honey from the cells.  It took about 4 days to completely strain all the honey into the bottom bucket.   Bottling the honey was quite fun.  We bottled both 1/2 lb. and 1 lb. glass bottles with lids from BetterBee to store our honey for sale & gifts.

Honey Gate ordered from Amazon

Crushed & Strained honey comb- honey drained out

Since we got our swarm of bees last Spring, we have been talking about establishing a second hive.  The purpose of this would be to have at least one of the 2 colonies survive winter, and thus be able to repopulate our 2nd hive with our own bees (in case of loss).  We purchased a 2nd Top Bar Hive from Bee Thinking over the winter.  Now we have 2 Top Bar Hives and ZERO bees.  The friend whom generously gave us one of his swarms last Spring lost all 4 of his hives this past winter, so unfortunately for both of us, there will be no swarms to give for winter losses.   Davis Family Honey Farm is only a few hours from us and is one of the few places I found that was not sold out of packaged bees for this Season.  

So that's the update on Redwoodshire Beekeeping for now.  We should receive our 3# package of bees around May 8th, and will update our bee installation at that point.

Here is the fruit of our bees' labors!  We ended up with about 21 1/2 lbs. of raw, unfiltered, treatment free honey.  Considering we only harvested 8 top bars of honey comb, this was more than we knew to expect.  We would have double that if the whole Top Bar Hive were completely full! With fingers crossed we can find a swarm to fill our 2nd Top Bar Hive, and we will have an abundance of honey to sell next season.

Redwoodshire Honey (1/2 lb. & 1 lb.)- Raw, Unfiltered, Treatment Free Honey

Debt Free Journey- 3 months in

A few months ago, I posted about the dream I have had about being completely Debt Free.  At this point, we are on Dave Ramsey's Baby Step 6: Pay the House Off Early.  Earlier this year we decided to take things seriously and have been living by a tight budget and putting everything extra into payments toward the principal of our home.  

Here's our Mortgage Pay Off chart, which is a fun reminder that hangs in the corner of my kitchen.  I get to color a line in every time we hit a milestone of $4k paid down on the principal of our mortgage.  


Our journey has been encouraging so far.  It's amazing how much money we were just letting slip through the cracks, simply because we weren't driven towards a specific goal.  We have always been good at saving money, but in recent years we got relaxed with our spending.  This became especially inflated when we purchased an old house that needed work done.  And with an old house in need of renovations, we found ourselves spending more money than was typical for us.  Five and a half acres of land, meant we needed a riding lawn mower.  Major renovations on the inside of our house just to make it livable.  Etc...  So after meeting a few savings goals, I proposed the reality that we could start paying a larger amount towards the principal each month.  After we refinanced our mortgage last fall (to an unbelievably low rate of 2.75%), we started adding an extra $100 to the mortgage principal each month.  The $100 was hardly noticed by us, and after a year would equal about 1 mortgage payment extra per year.  We then upped that extra monthly payment and by my original plan we should be paid off by March of 2023.  But paying off debt is a little addicting for me, and we have done unbelievably well the past 3 months with beating our budget (not spending as much as we allotted in each budget category).  We also applied our tax refund to our principal for the month of May.  So the past couple months has been encouraging to say the least in terms of watching the principal melt down more than my original goal.  So the original goal of March 2023 is a basis, but I hope to beat that down sooner than later.  

If you're following and bringing discipline to your financial health, I commend you and wish you the best as you strive towards your own personal goals!  It's totally worth it.  And as Dave Ramsey says... "Live like no one today, so that you can live like no one tomorrow".  I discovered a place on his website that has testimonials of real people doing the "Debt Free Scream" after they finally reached their goal of freedom.  It shares how much debt they paid off, the amount of time it took and the income they were earning to reach their goal.  Such inspiring stories to listen to.  It makes me long to be in their shoes and wish it were 6 years from now (I am hoping more like 3 years from now), so I could be sharing in the victory of debt freedom.  And soon enough, I know we will be there.  But it can't come soon enough!

Stats of Redwoodshire Mortgage Pay Off-
Purchased Redwoodshire October 2013
Jan. 2016 --->started paying extra $100 each month to principal
Sept. 2016---> refinanced mortgage to 2.75% @ 14% paid off  
Jan. 2017---> mortgage principal balance @ 16.7% paid off
May 2017---> remaining mortgage @ 22.7% paid off
goal by the end of December 2017----->  Be 33.3% paid off 

We are on our way!

A Tree Swing for this little Lady of 4 years

I love making a gift for my kids when it's time to celebrate another year of their life.  It's something special I can work on and express my heart through creativity.  And it's usually something that doesn't cost me much, as I usually can find the materials around my home.  And the hand crafted nature makes it something worth keeping for years and years.  I can't recall if I made anything year one.  Year 2 was a quilted set of Upper and Lowercase alphabet letters.  Year 3 was a princess Elsa dress & a book: The Tale of Two Berries, written by the Laird and illustrated by my mother.  This year it was time to make a big girl tree swing.  I proposed the idea to the Laird and he was on board.  He searched our garage and barn for a piece of scrap wood.  He settled on a left over piece of our 7" red oak flooring.  He glued 2 small pieces of wood on the underside for added support where the ropes would go.  Then he drilled the holes, to fit the 3/4" rope we ordered. The Laird actually had the wonderful idea that I should wood burn the Letter G onto it.  I searched the internet for a decorative G and found a beautiful one.  I think printed it out.  Colored the back side with pencil lead.  Then traced the design onto the wood.  Then it was time to wood burn.  Finally I finished the swing with a coat of polyurethane.  Last weekend, we ventured out back to find a good tree with good branches.  We moved our baby swing to the same tree, so that both kids could enjoy swinging together.

I absolutely LOVE how this swing turned out.  Though the 3/4" rope was a bit thick and difficult to work with (5/8" would have probably been good enough- but the 3/4" cost less), I love the look of it.  It reminds me of a smaller version of the wooden tree swing in the live action Cinderella movie.   It's so romantic, and I feel as though every little girl should have a wooden tree swing with extra thick rope to swing and daydream upon.

Another successful handcrafted gift to speak of.  Lady Genevieve loves it (I think more than the other small gifts we purchased for her birthday)- she's a lady after my own heart.  I love hand crafted/ made gifts more than any other thing anyone could buy for me.

High fives to this laird and lady of Redwoodshire!

"I've Got A Dream"

Rapunzel: [after releasing a branch that hits Hook Hand Thug on the head] PUT HIM DOWN (Flynn Rider)! [Everyone stops and stares at her in disbelief] Okay, I don't know where I am and I need him to take me to see the lanterns because I've been dreaming about them my entire life! FIND YOUR HUMANITY! Haven't any of you ever had a dream?!

Rapunzel has a dream.  To see the lanterns of the Festival of Lights that appear in the sky every year on her birthday.  What a magical experience!  I would love to see something like this in my lifetime too.  I think about this scene often, as Rapunzel belts this song out amidst a bunch of thugs in a tavern, who want to capture Flynn Rider.  She distracts them with questioning what dreams they have ever had.  After inspiring each one to consider their dreams they are then free to go. 

I have lots of dreams, but the one dream that has taken a center stage this year is the dream to attain complete financial freedom.  Ever since I graduated from college and was given a copy of The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey (from my mom), I have always dreamed of attaining this sort of freedom.  Inspired by what I read, the principles took deep root in my heart and I started living them out.  I was able to pay off $21,000 of school debt within 18 months of graduating college, while only working part time in my field! I was absolutely determined and I reached my goal.  I have been working the Baby Steps ever since then. In addition to paying off the debt, we've purchased every vehicle we've owned with cash.  Our only remaining debt consists of the properties that we own.

These Baby Steps have served me well.  They have given me direction and wisdom of what to focus on in order to gain financial stability.  Thankfully I married someone who was raised with a good financial head on his shoulders, and whose family prepared him well for financial success.  At this point, we are working on Step 6- Paying off Our Home Early.  

This is my Dream!  I dream of not having a monthly mortgage to pay.  Imagine not having a housing expense line in the monthly budget?!  More and more I am imaging what an amazing thing this would be. Sure, there are lots of things I would love to do.  I love to travel.  I love to work on renovation projects at Redwoodshire.  And all those things can still happen, if we are wise about our resources.  

Recently I have been evaluating our budget, which is actually more of a "Spending Tracker" than an actual budget we live by.  We used to be really good at saving money- that was before we purchased our old 1890's farmhouse with 5.5 acres of land.  Things all changed in 2013 when we moved here to Redwoodshire.  We needed to make some renovations to the house to make it more livable.  And once the money started flowing out... it just kept going out.  We have been doing projects and starting hobbies since then and haven't gotten out of the "Spending mode".  With land, we needed a riding mower... and then a wood splitter... and then a snow blower... and the dining room needed to be renovated... and then it was a chicken coop & a beehive..... on and on and on.  We plan to live here for the long run, so spending money on needed things did not seem like such a big deal, as they are more of an investment than an unnecessary expenditure.  

This time last year, I revisited my goal of eventually paying our home off.  I got the Laird to agree to putting a chunk of money available savings into the mortgage, and that felt great.  But it sort of just increased the itch inside of me to keep paying things down.  But then we decided to build a chicken coop and buy a beehive, and the itch faded for a while.  Last summer I noticed that mortgage interest rates were at an unbelievable all time low.  We discussed possibly re-financing the mortgage and decided this was a good move, considering our mortgage was in the mid-4% range.  Not bad, but rates were hovering around 3% at the time.  We ran the numbers for both the 30 and 15 year mortgages, and realized it was only going to cost about $100/month more for us to refinance down to a 15 year mortgage, which then allowed us a slightly lower interest rate.  AMAZING!  So we did it!  Original closing was October 2013, with a 30 year mortgage.  With 3 years paid off of that 30 year loan (27 to go), we refinanced down to a 15 year mortgage.  So with that move, we saved ourselves 17 years of mortgage payments.  Can't beat that!

After reaching some financial goals we had before us, I started looking at the numbers and running them through amortization calculators again.  With what it seemed like we could pay extra per month, I calculated that we could pay the remaining $127k on our mortgage by March of 2023.  That's 6 years from now.  Essentially that means paying off our new 15 year mortgage in a total of about 6 1/2 years.  Seriously!?!  This was all a hypothetical IF we could actually pay as much as I thought extra each month.  I shared my new goal with the Laird, and painted the picture of having our house paid off by 2023, and after a weekend of mulling it over, he seemed sold on the goal.  Once we looked at our budget, it appeared like the reality of this payment would be a lot more difficult that I had initially perceived.  And why wouldn't it?  It's like paying off a huge debt in lighting speed!  It's living like no one else today, so that you can live like no one else tomorrow.  Isn't completely DEBT FREE worth the sacrifices right now?  I believe it is.  So this past month we declared as "Frugal February".  We have really become aware of our spending, and have tried our best not to make unnecessary purchases.  The Laird has been amazing and has chosen to eat lunch at home or pack lunch so far all month.  I have been tempted, but resisted buying for the sake of buying.  We have cut back and have literally cut our expenses down dramatically.  Unlike most months, I look forward to itemizing all the expenses and inputting them into our budget to see how well we did this month.  There are so many fewer transactions, so it will take me a fraction of the time.  Not to mention the inspiration of what we're capable of when we really try to save for a greater purpose.  

So we're 23 days into February.  With only 5 days left of this short month, I asked myself how life has changed with spending less.  Has my quality of life diminished because I haven't made random shopping trips for things that we "need", but may not really need?  Has it been intolerable that I haven't stopped to McDonald's for a Mocha Frappe (my weakness, and source to make it through the sometimes long days of being a stay-at-home-mom)?  Has it been hard not eating out?  The answer is NO!  Life has felt so much simpler.  Less stuff.  More contentment.  Connection to gratitude for what we have.  Clarity of mind to know that WE WILL reach financial freedom in the near future.  Gratitude that we have the ability to pay extra on this huge debt.  Gratitude for the vision of something greater.  It's SO WORTH it.  

I got the "mortgage payoff chart" that I started last year back out and was able to color in one line of the picture.  We still have so far to go, but I now know that we're focused and we're going to be coloring in more lines of that chart every couple of months now, rather than one line each year.  On March 1st we will make our 2nd extra payment toward the "principle only".  Yay!  Let's hope that we can figure out a way to keep motivated toward making the little sacrifices that will be necessary for us to be able to continue making the largest extra payments that we are able.  That March of 2023 date needs to be our bottom line.... I would love to see that date move up closer and closer.  That may be a little overboard, but one can dream, right?!

DO YOU HAVE A DREAM?  Let yourself DREAM BIG about things that seem unreachable- because you just may be able to reach them.