Lost bees, lost chickens, lost time

Mama and I spent Saturday morning traveling to Muenster to pick up meat from the meat market. We had one of our older goats processed and ended up with thirty-two pounds of ground meat from the one-hundred-pound animal. Mama and I were a little disappointed to get so little meat, but that was a better outcome than selling the goat for a few dollars.  Mama was going to make the trip on her own but at the last minute I decided to do the driving so she would be spared the discomfort she suffers when she does drive for more than a short stretch. Since we were in Muenster, we stopped to get feed. We could have waited a few more days but again, Mama would have had to make the return trip to get feed anyway. We took the Sequoia because of the possibility of rain. That turned out to be a good idea because we drove through rain for the majority of the trip to and from Muenster. Meanwhile at the farm, we did not get enough rain to settle the dust. At the feed store I had to step out of the vehicle into an ankle deep stream of water from the runoff careening down the hill and into a storm drain in front of the feed store. We were back home before noon.

Almost as soon as we got home, I prepared some sugar water for the bees and got suited up to refill the feeders. In the first hive, all was well. The bees were making a little progress on the additional brood box I had put on only a couple weeks ago but they had completely emptied the syrup feeder – a whole gallon. On the next hive I was stunned to find no bees at all – not one in the hive. When I looked through the frames of the hive, I found all the cells that should have contained larvae or honey empty. Seven of the ten frames were drawn out with comb, but all the cells on all those frames were clean and empty. I am not at all sure what happened but the best guess I can make is that the bees absconded because of the loss of their queen. Perhaps I could have noticed the change in activity last week when I was in the hive, but I did not. What bees remained after the loss of the queen probably moved into the remaining three hives to live out their short lives. That’s my guess. When I find out a better explanation, I will let you know.

Among some other losses we are experiencing at the farm, Mama and I have had to dispose of several dead chickens recently. Almost all of the deaths have happened in the flock we keep in the little coop. We are not sure what the issue is, but it is concerning. The problem being that nothing obvious is presenting in the dead birds, so we are assuming that the issue is heat related. The larger flock in the coop building does not seem to be affected, only the small coop. So far, we have had four of our young birds die and we have lost an additional four by some means – probably coyotes – by which they simply fail to make it back to the coop after spending the day our foraging. Each year we suffer some losses, but this year has us wondering if something significant is happening in our coops. Determining what that crisis is and dealing effectively with it is the challenge. Mama is going to do some research this week to see if we can stumble onto the solution. There is generally a solution to be found, we just have to seek it out.

Lost time or lost opportunities are one of the losses we face that cannot be recovered. We can try to make up for lost time or recapture lost opportunities, but the outcomes are all too often less than what was missed initially. Lately, I feel like I am losing time. The days march relentlessly onward, consumed hour upon hour by work and life activities and the evenings simply slip away without notice. Simply put, I do not lead a disciplined, orderly life. For that reason alone, I am losing valuable time through each day and certainly through every evening. What is stealing my time? Electronics. Mostly my phone – watching a movie, catching up on the news, cleaning up the latest emails. It may take me three evenings to finish a movie as I watch it is sort segments, but reviewing the news and commentaries consumes an hour or more every evening.

To combat such interferences a list or schedule is mandated. So, over the next several evenings I will make such a list of the things I should be doing, writing, practicing the variety of instruments I am learning, doing some little item to clean up or organize an area in the house or shop, spending time in prayer, walking or otherwise exercising. There are any number of things I can be doing versus the mind dulling things I have been doing simply because those things require no effort on my part. Since I have tackled and abandoned this sort of life change several times, it is time to set things in order to maintain an evening schedule that can produce something with my time rather than letting it go to waste.

Such a schedule takes a good deal of emotional energy and I seem to have that in short supply lately. But I was told many years ago that nothing breeds success like success, so I will struggle through the initial stages of amending my life to a schedule until I begin to see some little successes and hopefully, those will incite the energy to continue to further successes.

Time will tell.