Bees, deer, and memories

January 4, 2026

 

Yesterday was a pretty good day. We made the trip to a bigger town to buy chicken feed, then made the trip to the property to check on the bees. Since it was in the mid-40s’, I didn’t worry about putting on the bee jacket with the hood, and I since I had a warm jacket on. The goal was to check on the sugar patty to see how much had been consumed, and there was enough left to last at least a few more weeks. This is my first winter to have bees to care for, so I have been worried about them. I only cracked the inner sanctum a few seconds, but the workers were crawling upwards, and the buzzing was dually noted. We hunted a few supplies to curtain a few potential air leaks where the cold winds could cause problems. Necessity is always the mother of invention, and we proved that yesterday with an empty dog food bag split up the sides and some small nails with plastic fittings normally used to hold wire in place.  We also moved a tail camera over to the bee area, just to see if they get any traffic in their area. So at sunset, I seen a nice young doe grazing in the area. I love all the nature. The next project will be to mix up another sugar patty to slide in the feeder, I got this.

While we were checking things out around the property, we jumped a few does in different areas, fixed a barb wire strand that had some deer damage. The tracks and the trail to the fence told the whole story. It was grey cool day, but it does my mind good to get out and lay eyes on the acres we have worked so hard to clear and maintain, from what it was when we bought it several years ago.

When we first started working with the property, it was covered in briars, saplings that were full of thorns, and invasive Bradford Pear trees. Of course, there were some hardwood trees too, so the selective deforestation, as I called it, began to take shape. I started off with bush hogging with an old 4020 tractor. I wasn’t familiar with the land, which wasn’t always flat, so it was a bit nerve wracking working around and between the small lakes. This is coming from a town raised woman, who was a nurse for over 20 years, and hadn’t driven a tractor since I was a teenager working on my grandfather’s melon farm. But it was so satisfying, clearing acre by acre of growth you couldn’t see over, to gentle pastures that are visible now. My husband said I was responsible for the clutch not working right now.

I even dug a stock pond in an area that a bit swampy in the winter, and thrilled it holds water all year round. That was the phase of my life where I learned to operate heavy machinery, and cleared groves of black locust trees. The brush piles still speak for themselves. The piles had to age a while before they would burn, so it was a process. One time, we had a brush pile that was almost the length of a football field and taller than the tractor. My husband used a bulldozer to push that mess together, and it was a beast, and burned it for about 3 days. But I took the rest out with a tractor, and later a skid steer. Those were good days, and worth all the blood, sweat, and tears. The goal was to build a house on the property, move there and develop a small working farm from the reclaimed strip mine land. Not believing that will ever happen at this point, because life often takes turns we can’t expect or anticipate. Be we live, learn, and continue to work to survive what it throws at us. The agriculture programs we had been participating in were trimmed from the Federal government, so that was income that was slashed from our budget too. The goal has now become to not lose everything we worked so hard for.