Tidy Brown Wren, bringing order to your nest

I'm still alive, just crazy busy.  Doesn't it seem that life gets really busy as soon as spring arrives?  Last week I prepared for a WOW (Women of the Word) event at my church.  We had a great turnout on Saturday morning and spent a few hours enjoying fellowship and food (of course) and I was able to share some great ideas for keeping balanced in your heart, your health, and your home.  Here is a little party favor I made for each of the ladies to take home.  After we set the table, we put some little speckled egg candy in each cup.  The paper tag can be used as a Bible Book Mark.  It had our theme verse on it.  After I got home from that event, we had a little event of our own at home - our bee hive swarmed.  This time we knew it was really our own.  We were prepared with new hive supers (boxes for the bees to live in).  Now we have two bee hives! Sunday morning was worship and work (I am one of the dir...

Usually, the honeybees in our back yard are housed in a bee hive.  They are very well behaved and work hard without much ado. However, sometimes they get an itch to high tail it out of the hive and search for greener grass.  When they do, they meet for an organizational meeting at a nearby hangout until they can make some plans.  When they do this, it's called a swarm.  It's a sight to behold.  This was our first.  We're not sure if these bees were from our hive or not.  I can't imagine that all of these bees could have fit in our hive and besides, our hive is still full of bees.  We called a beekeeper from the local bee guild and she came out and marveled at the size of the swarm (the biggest she'd ever seen) and then promptly got to work removing the swarm. She simply brushed off the bees and put them into a special bee bucket.  Once the queen was in the bucket, all of the bees followed her in there and that was tha...

We've welcomed a few new girls into the chicken pen for a few days.  We're chicken sitting for some friends from church until they get their chicken accommodations built.   They've been very good little cluckers.  Scratching and roaming and getting along just fine. I did have to run outside once this morning (in my pajamas and muck boots) to chase off what I thought was a hawk.  Turns out is was a buzzard and won't hurt the chickens.  At least I got some exercise - hope the neighbors weren't watching! That's our own Reba Mae on the right in the picture below.  She's our only chicken left - all of the others were attacked by wild dogs, coyotes, or hawks.  She's also our last "named" chicken.  We've learned to not name our chickens anymore.  We'll just call them "the girls".  She's enjoyed the company of other chickens for the past few days.  She's even layed an egg! In other news, the bee...