On April 5th we took a pleasant day off from the farm (after feeding all the animals) and went to pick up our shiny new dairy goat, Geraldine. She is a now two month old Nubian doeling. A very happy, spunky girl. She sat on Kristi's lap for the 2 hour trip home nibbling on a handful of grasses that we plucked from the side of the road. To economize on fuel we combined the trip with stopping in Navasota to pick up our first package of bees. We are now budding beekeepers!

Geraldine behaved herself in the potty department for the entire trip. That is, until we got home and I had stopped the truck, went around to open the door for Kristi and Geraldine and at that moment she began peeing on the seat. Sigh. You can take the goat out of the barnyard, but you can't take the barnyard out of the goat. You can quote me on that. In the few weeks we have had her she has had to go though many changes. Introduced to a different farm, different fields, different goats, barn et al. She has held up remarkably well. While we have done our best to protect her, the nature of goats to a new member of the herd is to show her who's boss. That means she gets butted around some. As far as I know she's been knocked down twice. We've stopped a bunch of hits and fortunately the butts have settled down. after 3 weeks she is pretty much a member of the herd and is with them as they move from field to field.

She was a bottle baby and we didn't want to add to her stress by abruptly changing her diet at the same time as moving her, so she stayed on the bottle. Each morning and afternoon she would get a nice warm bottle of our baby goat formula. That includes 1/2 whole milk, 1/4 buttermilk and 1/4 milk replacer. This mixture helps to prevent scours and they like it. The downside is it's expensive and we had 3 bottle babies going at the same time. It seems like we were running to the store every other day for milk. Slowly we began to wean off all 3 babies. 1 went quickly. He's a wether and while he was the biggest of the 3, he was mostly weaned to pasture anyway. Since he was sharing a bottle with the other wether, the bottle was pretty much empty by the time he got his turn. Geraldine was easy. To help ease her into the herd and help her become familiar with the herd and surroundings, I attached her bottle holder to the milking stand. She would stand up there with her bottle and was able to watch and hear the feeding frenzy in the barn. One day I left the bottle in the tack room and gave her a cup of grain. There was a little confusion on her part but all by herself she began eating grain. She is so prim and proper that she would take one tiny little piece at a time, chew it thoroughly and swallow before taking the next piece. The other goats take huge mouthfuls and I don't see much chewing going on. Of course, they have competition (40 goats are getting only a half bucket of grain) but goats take great pleasure in bashing each other during feeding time. Eating seems secondary. So all the babies are weaned now. Only the smallest wether has had trouble adjusting. He still comes around and tries to suck on fingers, clothing, shoes, the barn, stall bars and anything else get can get his lips on.

A week before we went to collect the goat and bees Kristi hurt her back. It was my fault. At the end of a long hard day of work I wanted to get one last thing done. I wanted to remove some field fencing that had been wired to the electric fencing between the house and garden. This would improve the appearance and view which nice, but my main goal was weedwacking. The weeds grow quickly here and I use a string trimmer to keep them down. The string however seems magnetically attracted to the wire of the field fencing. So I can't get very close to it. and since most of the weeds grew right at the fenceline a lot would go untrimmed and the fence looked unsightly.

I had detached the field fencing and laid it down on the ground. The fencing was longer than the width of the field (it had gone around a corner at one end) and I needed to pull it out straight before I could roll it up. It was about 80 feet long and with the early spring weeds it was too much for me alone to move it. So I was pulling the whole thing while Kristi was jockying it around a corner so it wouldn't get hung up. At some point during this exercise, she pulled a muscle in a bad way. From that point on she was in pain for about 6 weeks!

Kristi was hardly able to move when we left to go pick up the goat and bees. I'd have done it myself, but she would have none of that. She had to be right in the middle of it. While the drive out and back went well, there was a minor problem. We now had a package of bees. A package of bees is a small portable screened room with food and separate quarters for the queen. The package contains 11,000 bees. Kristi was the one who was going to be the beekeeper. I was interested, but she was going to do the handling. With her back the way it was she couldn't run away if anything went wrong ( like if she dropped the whole package). So I got to do the handling. We had all the stuff. Bee veil - the metal mesh hood that prevents bees from crawling into your nose and ears. We had a suit. Gloves. A smoker to *calm* the bees (yeah, right). Our hive was set up and ready. So I put the veil on and installed the bees. The way you install bees follows.

First you remove a wooden or in our case cardboard cover from the package this exposes a soup can that contains sugar syrup. Fast food for bees. It takes a lot of food to keep 11,000 bees fed. I removed the can and that exposed the queens cage and also it made a large opening that bees could get out through. I removed the queens cage with my bare fingers. I put the cardboard cover back over the hole to keep the bees from escaping before I was ready for them. Kristi was snapping pictures from a safe distance. The queens cage was completely covered with bees. There must have been a hundred bees on it. You couldn't see into the cage because of all the bees. Carefully I got out my pocket knife and removed the tiny cork that prevents the queen from getting out. I then placed the queens cage into the hive and fastened it into place. She can now come out when ever she wants to.
The next step was fun. I read the instructions for this step several times to be SURE I had it right. Once again I removed the cover from the package. the bees were buzzing loudly. I then whacked the package of 11,000 bees on the ground to dislodge them from the top of the cage, turned it upside down and proceeded to shake the bees out of the package into the hive. This is where I had to stifle the "run away now" reflex. When I had most of them out, or when I couldn't stand it anymore - that whole part is a fog- I carefully inserted some frames into the hive, they had been removed earlier to create enough room for all the bees. Then I slowly, to avoid crushing them-that can make them mad- put the cover back on top of the hive. I left the package in front of the hive with the opening of the package facing the opening of the hive. I then stepped slowly away and removed the veil. Whew. We sat there for hours watching as the bees from the package slowly made their way out and over to the hive.

How many times did I get stung?

Not once.