I have checked out the street view of our house before on Google Maps, but today I tried sashaying down the block a little.  Lo and behold, the Google cams captured Ann (masked by tree leaves), Madeleine (pushing her play shopping cart), and an apparent playmate (behind the tree, pushing a tricycle).

Ann is somewhat perturbed, but I think it's cool!

We are pleased to announce that after a long hiatus, some of our most popular site features have returned.

Our live chicken cam is now back online and perched on the edge of our coop peering in through the chicken wire.  We may be tweaking it over the next few days to try to get the best angle.  The chickens have free range of the corner of our yard during the day, but they come back into the coop to lay, eat, and drink.  The nest boxes (where they lay) are directly ahead, with the water dispenser above it.  Their food dispenser is to the left.

We also have our egg ticker back in the right column of every page.  Take a look... it's okay, I'll wait.  That's showing the total counts laid by our current flock to date.  You can also see the full calendar with eggs laid each day for our current flock (calendar for our first flock is here).  You can see how long it took before each flock started laying and on the older calendar the variation in laying rates by season. 

Ann's been particularly excited with this flock to watch the laying progress ("Quiche is back in the nest box again."), so I presume she'll be keeping the new calendar up-to-date.

It took our bees about 3 ½ months of working steadily, but they've now provided us with our first 50 pounds or so of honey. (Technically, we've gotten honey from a hive in our backyard in the past, but that was when someone else was doing the beekeeping for us and he gifted us with a jar or two before selling the rest.)  However, yesterday was the big day for my neighbor Dell and I (the two "official" beekeepers, although the rest of our households get a lot of credit too). A friend and veteran beekeeper, John, generously offered a few hours of his time to help us learn how to extract the honey, and he showed us quite a few tips along the way as he examined our hives. He gave us our first glimpse at a queen bee (she is twice the size of the worker bees) and helped us diagnose some of the happenings in the hives in recent weeks. 

One of our colonies has been exceptionally strong, so we were able to harvest nine frames of honey from that one. The other has been queenless for a time and hasn't been very productive, so we didn't extract any from it. We couldn't complain; a 50 pound harvest (about 17 quarts worth) seems bountiful to us, even though I know of beekeepers who get 300 pounds in a season with two hives. If we were to sell all of our honey at the going rate, generally $7-$9 a pound, we'd have a good start at recouping some of our $555 start-up costs.

Our harvesting party turned into a neighborhood affair as several people joined us for John's teach-in at the site of the hives (our neighbors' backyard). Madeleine and John's five-year-old daughter alternately watched with interest—she in her own bee suit (now Maddy wants one)—and played quietly by themselves, completely unfazed by the sight of thousands of bees buzzing around. After we "worked the hives," we traipsed the honey-filled frames to our shed where we had set up the extractor equipment.

Others joined us to help handcrank the extractor (a large centrifuge that spins the honey out of the frames) and to see the honey flow. We let it settle overnight so the wax would rise to the top, and this morning we lined up our jars, opened the spigot, and oohed and ahhed as it filled jar after jar.

Because we don't have all the fancy beekeeper's equipment, we haven't perfected a method for recapturing all the beeswax that gets lost in the extracting process. Nor have we perfected a straining system to keep small bits of wax out of the honey, so you'll notice in the photos that our honey comes in "creamy" and "chunky" varieties (although the wax does rise to the top by itself in a matter of hours). It all tastes the same, and Madeleine will attest that it's yummy. We hope to have more honey to harvest by this fall, and we expect by then our harvesting techniques will have improved. In the meantime, there will be a lot of bread baking and granola making happening in the neighborhood this week.

You can find more photos of the event here.

Now, I know this is a family blog and all, but this seemed like something that we needed to share here.  You see, Ann has been leaving bed in the early morning (at least for her) to have plant sex.

You'd think that having two bee hives in the immediate vicinity would be enough to get adequate pollination of our squash and zucchini, but Ann has been dissatisfied.  So, taking a cue from our next-door neighbor, she has been taking a small artist's paintbrush in hand and pollinating manually.

Squash, zucchini, and other vine fruit produce both male and female flowers on the same plant and pollen from the male flowers has to get to the female flowers for them to turn into fruit.  So the process is to "tickle" the stamen in a male flower and then "tickle" the tip of the pistil in a female flower.  This has to be done when you catch both of them open, usually requiring an early morning hour.

After she returns to bed, I usually only get a grunt in response to my query of whether it was "good for you."

Madeleine officially entered the "terrific twos" recently and with that turning she continues to be a pretty terrific kid.

As her vocabulary explodes we have wondered "Where has our little girl gone?" when she now says "Peek-a-boo" instead of simply "peek." Her favored manner of communicating continues to be with shouted exclamations and imperatives. She did enjoy announcing to the entire congregation during an especially quiet moment at mass recently "Poop!" as she pretended to change her baby doll's diaper.

Favorite activities continue to be playing with her doll (now she likes to nurse it), feeding the chickens and going on egg hunts (she can identify their cackles when they've just laid an egg), visiting our two beehives where she flaps her arms and implores the bees to "fly!", and any other outdoor activity, especially if it involves dirt, water, cats, climbing, swinging, or riding on the back of mommy's bike. We are fortunate to have many wonderful neighbors who welcome her presence in their front and back yards, because she thinks those are extensions of her yard anyway.

In this most recent quarter of her life, Madeleine became a seasoned traveler. We spent five days in Santa Cruz on a retreat in April where she loved the ocean and beaches. We then took a week-long road trip to Oregon in May, where she quickly took to farm life with its various domesticated animals, tractors, and a large trampoline. The week-long trip to Illinois and Indiana via airplane in June was exciting too. Her introvert side came out strong on the first two trips, but  she proved to be quite the precocious show-off to her grandparents, great-grandarents and other extended family in the midwest.

We had a great birthday week—remember we have 3 days of labor to celebrate. It was the second year in a row we tried plum pie as the birthday dessert since July brings us thousands of plums from our three trees. This year Madeleine took one bite of pie and wailed, "No. Crackers!" as in "I want crackers instead." We had a small party with mostly neighbors present. It was gratifying to see what a well-loved figure Madeleine has become on our block. Two of her godparents also came and they suggested a small parade around the block with the birthday girl leading the way. She happily blew her kazoo at the head of the procession, but later was upset when we returned home without having witnessed a "real" parade that included horses in it.

Photos from the past few months can be seen here.