This weekend was the Minnesota home school conference in St. Paul, but also the time when the rest of our bee packages arrived. So, Jana went to the home school conference while I stayed with the kids and received the bees. On Friday afternoon, my folks came up to help – my mom stayed with the kids while dad and I picked up the bees, and put them in 3 hives on our property here and 2 at my folk’s in Iowa. The kids and I decided to make a photo-blog of our time to show to “mom” when she returned. The first photo above is a bunch of hive equipment strewn out on the asphalt while I select frames and boxes to make up the three hives needed here. Our neighbor’s bees found the left-over wax & honey from the winter deadouts so I had to work fast and keep as many stacks covered as possible.

Here’s Sadie pretending to help with the setup of our new hive location (on the hill). There are so many old gopher mounds in the area, we had to do some leveling with the shovel. This is the hive that we attempted the “live video” stream from when installing the package of bees.

We picked the bees up from near Douglas at the Bee Shed. There were both wooden cages and newer plastic ones. Each contains a new colony of bees and a mated queen.

Dumping the bees into a “medium” box with mostly drawn frames…

Here’s “grandpa” checking on an overwintered hive next to 3 new hives that we installed packages in. The overwintered one has a much taller “stack” of boxes because we gave them extra boxes of honey and they are already hatching new generations of bees and increasing their population. If the queen does OK over the next couple weeks, then we’ll be able to split this hive.

Saturday morning was bright and sunny. It felt like spring had finally arrived in fullness with the bees in their hives and out foraging. Here’s a couple pictures of them foraging cherry blossoms. This bee is collecting pollen as well – these blossoms have plenty of that and that is really helpful for the new bee packages to get fresh pollen right away.

The bees seem happy in their new digs.

A fresh gopher mound appeared that morning. We brought the Styrofoam airplanes out to play in the light breeze.

Trampoline time!

This was taken just after we got the lawn tractor jump started.

Aidan was loving being in the driver’s seat while Sadie was feeling proud about buckling herself in.

My grandma bought a pig for butchering and we got some of the meat for our freezer. This is really great – pork chops on the grill coming up soon. Thanks Grandma Mary!

Ba-ba brought a watermelon and Sadie enjoyed some for lunch.

Then we went on an “exploration walk” in the woods.

Aidan led the way for a while – he was excited about finding new trails.

Evan found plants (wild cucumbers says Jana) growing in a fallen tree trunk.

Sadie tried her balancing ability on the tree trunk as well, only to find that the hens were following her, all in a row 🙂

They noticed fungi growing from the ground.

Evan found a branch with a dried curlicue stem on it. If he held it a certain way, it looked like he had half a pair of spectacles on.

Some trees had leaves more fully formed than others. This one had an interesting bud near it that had not opened yet.

Then we walked the ditch by our property, picking up the trash that had accumulated over the winter. Evan was not so fond of that job 🙂

After our walk, Evan looked at his minecraft book in the yard while Aidan and Sadie played in the sand pile and on the swing.

Aidan did a “no-no” and put sand on the trampoline. So, then he had the job of sweeping it off. Well, in an ideal world, he would be capable of doing this job 🙂

And then finally, mom arrived, and there was much celebrating and eating of pizza on a picnic blanket in the yard!