This is an closeup of some Lion's Mane that Sharon has been growing.  Looking good!

I never noticed these until I started keeping honey bees.  Maple trees blooms are an important late winter nectar and pollen source for honey bees.

Right now this appears to be the strongest of the hives.  The bearding is extensive.  The bees are covering the entrance holes with their bodies, leaving only a small channel formed by their own bodies.  I cannot imagine anything that could get past these ladies!!!

After four years, we finally figured out how to harvest our pears.  The previous owners had planted a couple of pear trees.  The trees are vigorous growers.  That first year I remember the two trees brimming with hundreds of pears.  Then the next time I looked, they were all gone!  What?!
     The next year, 2016, we paid more attention.  So we got the pears before the critters did.  But they were hard as bricks.  We had no idea how to tell when they were ripe.  I ended up food processing these and making pear bread.  It was actually tasty!
     2017 was just a bad year, due the winter, when it got too warm, too early, followed by a cold snap.  There were hardly any pears on the south tree.  The north tree had none at all.
     2018, I can't say I remember even paying attention.
     2019, this year I've been paying more attention to these trees, because one of them is right by the bee hives, so I notice it quite often.  The other one is closer to the playset.  It usually has more pears.  This year it has branches quite long, with clusters of heavy pears touching the ground in some places.
     So I started to gather them.  If they came off easy, I was pretty sure they were ready.  Some you could twist slightly or bend at the stem and it would come off.
     Near as I could tell, these were Bosc pears, described as staying firm even when ripe, so it has more the consistency of apples.  
     The pears spoil from the inside out, so it is hard to tell when they are ripe, especially a Bosc pear, which is very firm.
     I followed the advice given on another blog, to cool them for a week.  I put the bags in the basement.  This seemed to work great with our pears!  After I week, I noticed moths coming around the pears.  I checked the necks, they were firm but somewhat giving.
     We dilly-dallied for a couple of days while the ripe firms were sitting in the dining room.  I gave a bag to my cousins.  
     Finally, today I juiced the remaining ripe pears.  It turned out to be about four quarts of pear juice.  Sharon would like to make pear cider.  So we are going to start a fermentation process.

From what I have read, the primary fermentation can be vigorous.  These pears, some of them were already starting to spoil from the inside, so I am fairly certain they are inoculated with the appropriate yeasts.
     So here we have about three quarts of pear juice in a 5 quart bucket.  I moved the towel so you could see the juice, but I immediately covered it back up, because otherwise the bugs will get in there.
     I am trusting to the wild fermentation, ala Sandor Katz, meaning no adding champagne yeast.  We will see!  More later....

Chickens eat chicken eggs!  I'm sure this happens in nature, and on factory farms, but not so fun if you are keeping chickens for eggs.  Can't tell from this camera angle if she is eating her own egg or the egg from a different chicken.  Asides from the loss of eggs, this creates a mess and can be unsanitary.  You can see this hen dripping yolk everywhere.

     So what steps should you take if your hens are eating eggs.  First you have to notice.  In this video you see the hen removing the egg entirely from the nest box.  If I hadn't seen the video I don't know if I would have known that an egg was missing.  They aren't always this stealthy though.  Sometimes you will see an unfinished egg.  More often there will be egg whites and yolk all over the other eggs.
     Ideally, you want to identify exactly which hen is eating eggs.  This isn't easy because it requires direct observation over a period of hours.  For example, this video was from 11 a.m.  We first tried "roll away" nest boxes which are designed for the eggs to roll into a compartment where the hens can't reach the eggs.  These specialty boxes are expensive and there is NO guarantee that your hens will actually use them.  In fact our hens totally ignore them and lay elsewhere.
     Then I set up a video camera.  I used a Cloud Cam, but I can't say that I would recommend it right now because Amazon makes it unnecessarily difficult to review clips.  Other cameras will save video to a SD card which you can more easily view.  This isn't an option for the Cloud Cam.  You will also notice from the clip it begins "in media res".  The camera literally recorded nothing for the proceeding half-hour that the chicken was sitting there in the nest box.

Here we are hanging echinacea flowers and stalks to dry.  After it has dried, it can be made into a tea, or other medicine.  The roots are also medicinal.

Spiral Scouts troop the Flowering Branches camped out at Fort Yargo over the weekend.  They worked on their badges and played in the lake.

Insects are like faeries to me.  This moth is so beautiful and magical.