Activities around Geek Acres

What can I say but life is pretty busy, we are gearing up for beekeeping, dealing with a mud season (aka muddy ponies) and preparing for spring in many different ways.

Steve has been working from home rather than on site for his recent contract, which has been great. He's also had some fun making things with his new wood working toys. He's made several bluebird boxes, hive stands and a beekeeping tool box for me and has other things in the works. 

 I've spent a lot of time painting the beehives. There are many steps involved since I'm not painting them just one color, I'm painting them like houses. The first one I painted like this cute building we saw in Rome that was gorgeous. Then I decided to make a stone sided gothic style manor. I found a dollhouse company that makes cool stencils for doing stonework on dollhouses so I used it for the beehives using paint. Easy peasy! Just takes a really long time but going a little crazy on cuteness is sort of my thing. 

We also prepared our apiary site.  The first site we had liked was a bit too shady so we decided on one much more prominent in our backyard and with full sun.  Hopefully it will work well.  

That shady area is just down the hill from the beautiful plum tree we had to majorly cut back.  It was plagued by black knot fungus with the only way to help it survive being to cut out the infected wood.  I thought this tree was so pretty but it was over grown, not pruned and in a shady area it just had all cards stacked against it.  We will see if it can survive and if it will return to it's pretty self some years down the road

Stay tuned, we got our bees and I have a video of our bee package installations.

I have a pinched nerve in my neck and having pain and numbness so haven't been able to do much the past couple of days.  The horses are doing good, I've been dying to go work with them but that will have to wait a little bit.  At least it's greening up and they are shedding and getting shiny again!