Here's some stuff from the beginning of the house building. As you can see, they'd poured a gravel base on the house site, and then we had to dig foundation walls around the edge of that for the concrete to have a good footing. Here's some pictures.
First we dug some by hand.

Then we got a fun tool.

Then the tool ran into some obstacles, mainly the previous house, and we had to do some more hand digging.

I think Alice wanted me to do more blog posts about bees. So here's some bugs that have been hanging out on the tops of one of our hives. We're hoping they're not hive beetles, which would seriously mess up the hive. Maybe they're cockroaches, which apparently isn't that much of a problem. For scale, the notches in the wood are an inch wide.

getting ready to pour the bees in, trying to find the queen.

Giving the bees some sugar to calm them down before I put them in the hive.
This was kindof counteracted by my sticking my hand in the box to look for the queen.

here's some miscelaneous workers surrounding the queen box. if you look close, the queen's still inside.

This past Friday Nicholas and I (Chantal) went out to the farm to get our new bees started in their new home.
Even though the bees had to deal with the weather being a bit chilly, windy and sprinkling I think they took to their hive just fine. Nicholas has never lead a bee rehousing and I had never been around so many bees before, the event went pretty smoothly. Nicholas only got stung five times while I managed not to get stung at all.

Pictures coming soon!

This Saturday from 10-4:30 we will be having a workday on the farm.
We'll be planting strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, cherries, hazelnuts, chokecherries, chokeberries, plums, oaks, and a lot of other things. Also, since it will be Labor Day, we'll be providing our workers with a lunch, partially prepared from the garden, and will have a little discussion on labor (and its fruits(hahahaha)). But yes, that's actually what we'll be talking about. Details below: