Lots to Catch Up On

Sorry for not posting for a few days... Here's a brief recap of what happened:

Saturday -

I worked the farmer's market in the morning. Here's a video. In the afternoon I went for a bike ride along the Paul Bunyan trail from Lake Bemidji State Park down to Paul Bunyan and Babe and back. Here's a video of me at the infamous statues in Bemidji. Here's a photo:

Sunday -

We had a lazy morning. Had pancakes for breakfast and then I partook in their religious service. The family I am staying with is Quaker. Because there is not a large community here they hold service each week at their home with only their family. They do a 30 minute music session where they stand around the piano and sing as Paul, the husband, plays. After that they spend 30 minutes in silent meditation. It was a new experience for me and spending time meditating each week actually sounds quite nice. The one thing about their Quakerism that I've really enjoyed is that before each meal we sit in silence holding hands and express our gratitude however we would like (silently) before the meal begins. Then, the person who made the meal squeezes the hands of those they are sitting next to until everyone is squeezing hands. It has been a nice moment for me to think each day about an experience from that day that I was grateful for. Here's a picture of the family that we took on Sunday:

Left to Right: Hannah (18), Li (13), Paul, Becky, Me

Monday -

We harvested CSA shares in the morning, as usual. In the afternoon, Hannah, Paul, and Becky left to take Hannah to Carlton to start college. How exciting for everyone! I can't remember what I did in the afternoon.....

Tuesday -

I was in charge of the farm all by myself! That meant I had 1 dog, 5 cats, 40 cattle, 50+ chickens, 1 turkey, goldfish, a snake, a turtle, a salamander, and many, many chicks in my care. It was the craziest think ever! I found an entire family on chicks - chicks we didn't know were hatching. I also found a nest of eggs, 10 in all. Here is the family of chicks that I found that we didn't know about:

I was also tasked with keeping me eye on some chicks that we were expecting to hatch. Int his photo you can see three of them, two very clearly and the third just poking out from under momma in the front left.

In the morning on Tuesday I went for the Wilderness Drive bike ride around Lake Itasca State Park. The bike ride was beautiful but had more hills than I anticipated and I did not find it to be as relaxing as I'd hoped. I would maybe do it again, I'm not sure at this time. I did stop a Peace Pipe Vista and saw the following plaque. I thought I'd share since it has some pretty cool facts about MN on it:

Today/Wednesday -

Today was a very exciting day as far as farm life is concerned. This morning Paul and I went to check on the chicks there were hatching int he barn, pictured above where the mom is sitting on her chicks. We found that 5 had hatched of the 15 eggs. As we were gathering the unhatched eggs we realized 1 was still alive. Paul decided to hatch the egg himself and what we found was a folded up, wet, slimy, scrawny (in my opinion) chick that was healthy as can be. Here's a photo:

The chick was very cold so we brought it in to warm it up with the hair dryer. Here's a video and here's a photo:

After the chick was mostly dry this is what it looked like:

Then, in the afternoon today, we did bee keeping!!! This was a crazy experience. We are going to be harvesting the honey on Friday so today we had to put in special bee blocker things in the hives so the bees can only leave the area where the honey is and not get back in. This will (hopefully) ensure that on Friday when we go to get the honey out there are no (or only a few) bees in there. Here are a few photos. Please note, that in the photos with the bees I am not using a zoom feature on my camera. I am actually that close to the bees!

The queen bee is in this photo. She's in the middle but I'm not sure how to point here out in this blog photo... She's the bee that is about 1.5 times longer than the other bees and doesn't appear striped. Another bee is slightly covering her back. Hope you can find her. Where's Waldo anyone?

Me in bee gear. In this photo you can see I'm wearing the bee veil and gloves. I'm also wearing a white shirt. On the bottom, however, which you can't see I'm wearing jeans and dark rain boots. To bees, dark clothes apparently make you look like a predator. 

Inside the hive. Bees EVERYWHERE!

So that was crazy! I didn't get stung at all which was fantastic. Thank god for the gloves and the veil because I did have bees landing on my hands/arms and flying around my face. None of them were looking mad/like they wanted to sting, but I'm VERY happy I had the protective gear nonetheless.

Okay, off to bed now since I'm going to be up early tomorrow harvesting for the CSA. Night!