Have you ever been pooped on by a honey bee? Walk past a beehive on a warm, winter day, following a long cold spell, and you probably will be! Bees will do everything they can to avoid pooping inside the hive, and they can hold it a LONG time. In the winter, when cold weather …
Author Archives: rpgreen61
Winter worries 2025
I continue in my role as the editor of the Michigan Beekeepers Association Newsletter, and in that role, I write a short editor’s introduction for the newsletter each quarter. Sometimes those pieces seem appropriate to share as a farm story as well. I think this one qualifies. Editor’s Musings: As I sit down to put …
Too many goodbyes
Since we said goodbye to Bear in December, 2023, it feels like we have said too many goodbyes to the 4-legged companions in our lives: to Ditto, our sweet twenty year old cat, to Ichabod, our five year old “companion” goat, and last week to Bella, our beloved thirteen year old goldendoodle. Ditto’s mother, Patches, …
Farm mothers… or not
With our oldest ‘mama’ goat expecting kids again in the next few days, my mind is drawn to motherhood on the farm, so I thought I would share one of our recent “mothering” adventures. Those of you who have read my prior stories know fostering chicks with a broody hen is a useful alternative to …
Tail feathers
The backyard is littered with feathers …. and a reliable eyewitness reports that the perpetrator of the attempted murder was a member of our household. Meet Willow. She is a Bernedoodle, who joined us in Decembers, at age 7 months, and will be one year old next week. Although she is our third dog, she is …
Swarm season is… April!?
In the grand scheme of things, I am a relatively small-scale beekeeper, aiming for an end of winter hive count of around 20 hives. That puts me somewhere between a “hobbyist” beekeeper (usually less than 20-30 hives) and a sideliner beekeeper (20 -30 up to around 100 hives, and making some money on the side, …
Black gold
“Composting is the natural process of recycling organic matter, such as leaves and food scraps, into a valuable fertilizer that can enrich soil and plants. Anything that grows decomposes eventually; composting simply speeds up the process by providing an ideal environment for bacteria, fungi, and other decomposing organisms (such as worms, sowbugs, and nematodes) to …
Stow aways!
For me, preparing hives for winter means putting insulation on the top, wrapping the hives with a relatively modest insulation, and adding mouse guards to the entrances. The mouse guards are needed because, believe it or not, mice love to cohabitate with bees during the winter. They seem willing to risk the possibility of being …
Sad goodbye
For most of my life I have had cats and right up to the age of 50, I would have told you I was a cat person, through and through. My husband, Gary, is definitively a dog person, but for years declined to adopt a dog because we were both working long hours and he …
A $600 jar of honey
I am the editor for the Michigan Beekeepers Association‘s (MBA) quarterly newsletter, and I wrote this story for my “Editor’s Musing” section of the newsletter that came out in November. At the moment it was happening, it didn’t seem amusing at all, but after the fact, it makes for an interesting story, so thought I …