Good news and bad news

I suppose it is the nature of life that there is good and bad (or at least pleasant and unpleasant) stuff that happens.

So the bad news here lately was that our bees died (well, technically mine and Annie's Bees died - David has a hive strictly for pollination that seems to be okay). I'm not 100% on when that happened. I brought them here to the farm perhaps a month or so ago - and at that time the hive seemed very light, and there was no buzzing coming from it even as we jostled it. On getting it home I was not as diligent as I should have been about feeding them. I wanted to check in on them (the one time I did feed them, it seemed like the feed had mostly leaked out slowly rather than the bees eating it), but the weather was too cold for a while to open the hive.

About a week or two before Christmas we finally got some warm weather and I went out and opened my hive - and there were perhaps two or three live bees in it, no honey and neither of those two or three bees were queens. The hive was dead. I'm far from an expert, but my first guess was a disease known as chalkbrood. Which is not horrible and usually only kills weak hives. It may be some other disease, however, in which case it may be getting into David's hive (I suspect those few live bees were from another hive, most likely Davids) and if it is the wrong disease it would mean burning the hives (which are not of such great quality anyway, so that wouldn't be the end of the world).

On a better note Annie and I now have a regular beer brewing schedule in conjunction with the brewmaster for our local nano brewery (nano - smaller than micro - and in this case not yet a commercial venture). We began by brewing a pilsner which we brewed about two weeks ago. This was only my second "all grain" batch (meaning using actual malted barley - rather than malted barley extract) and for both our brewer friend and us our first attempt at a lager - which requires greater temperature control during fermentation.

Yesterday we "racked" the pilsner - which means we siphoned it from the bucket it was in into another bucket to get it off of the yeast who had given their lives for our eventual drinking pleasure. If it sits on the dead yeast too long their bodies begin bursting bringing bad (alliteration is fun) flavors into the beer. Lagers ferment longer at cooler temperatures, so you have to rack them to get them off the yeast that die in the initial fermentation.

It is also worth noting that we seem to have a chicken sickness traveling around our chicks. There is a lot of sneezing in the barnyard, and one of the youngest chicks (a silver Maran) was dead under the chicken house our first day back. We are now giving the chickens an antibiotic in their water to hopefully clear this up.

Hoppie and Lilly have to some extent moved into their new barn (which was water tight when we left for the holidays - but developed a leak or two while we were gone - argh) - since if we kept them on the same side of the fence as the chicken waterer they would be getting the antibiotic too. Arthur seems a bit unwilling to climb the steps into the barn (okay absolutely "I'll kick you in the balls if you try to lift me into that place" unwililng). I'm guessing with the rain surely he will eventually at least go under it (which is probably drier than in it given the recent new leaks).

And I guess that is most of our news from here. Annie and I had good holidays, and were glad to see our families and had a grand time.

Jeff