Greenhorns

by Paula Manalo

  Our task for the afternoon was to look for eggs in each hive, to make sure the queens were fulfilling their purpose. If we couldn’t find any eggs, we would have to find the queen herself to make sure she was still alive; otherwise, the colony would most likely die.

  Dan lifted off the top of the first hive and we looked down on ten frames, like ten long books in a fallen shelf. The brooder was swollen with bees moving vertically throughout the thin spaces between each frame. My eyes widened as he plunged his naked hands into the open hive and gingerly lifted out a frame. At least twenty bees crawled over his sun-baked hands as he nonchalantly began demonstrating how to find the eggs. Horrified at the scene, I interrupted him to ask why they weren’t stinging him.

  He looked surprised, as though it’s perfectly normal to use bare hands to handle insects equipped with weapons on their butts.

  “Oh, by now we’ve built a relationship with each other, haven’t we?” he said rather sweetly to the bees that were examining his hands in search of nectar. “They’re used to me invading their space once a week. I know better than to come on a cold rainy day, when they’re irritable. On a sunny day like this, they ignore me.”

  Even though I was wearing what was practically body armor, I silently hoped they would ignore me too.

  I watched Dan as he held up the frame to the sunlight to search for eggs. The wax film that was set into the wooden frame was partially filled out with hundreds of hexagonal shapes, but they were empty: no eggs to be found. He replaced it and retrieved the next one, then repeated this process two more times until, finally, there they were: the minuscule white lines that were bee eggs, each one no larger than a comma. The next frame housed larvae and a few odd-looking cells that stuck out from the frame like warts.

  “What are those?” I asked, repulsed by the bumps, which resembled boils marring an otherwise beautiful face.

  “Those are drone cells,” Dan said, “eggs that turn into males. The hive is almost entirely run by females, you know.” He glanced at me. “Out of all of these bees, only a couple of hundred are male. All the worker bees are female. They do everything but lay eggs and mate. The drones,” he said, smiling, “are kept around simply for mating with queens from other hives. When they’re not mating, they sit around and gorge themselves on the honey and pollen that the females worked so hard to store. But they die soon after they mate. And if they fail to mate, they’re thrown out of the hive in the fall and they die anyway. The women don’t want to keep them around for the winter.” He chuckled at the thought.

  Dan placed the frame back in the hive and changed the topic.

  “Well, we know this hive is active,” he said, “so we don’t need to find the queen.” Satisfied, he replaced the lid on the hive and we moved on to the next one.

  “What happens if we don’t find any eggs but the queen is still there?” I asked.

  Dan got a gloomy look on his face. “Then I have to perform the depressing business of killing her, and introduce a new queen, although often the colony will start creating a new queen on their own.”

  I was confused. He continued: “They choose some larvae to feed what’s called the royal jelly. This jelly creates a new queen that fights the old queen to death in order to claim her throne. These queen cells look different from normal eggs cells, too — they stick out on the bottom of the frame like raindrops, like they’re trying to hide the fact that they’re planning a mutiny.”

  * * *

  My eyes widened as he plunged his naked hands into the open hive and gingerly lifted out a frame.

  * * *

  Dan let me look through the frames on the second hive while he recorded our previous findings in a little notebook. After about ten minutes of painstakingly removing each frame and trying not to crush any bees with my stiff gloves, I told him, embarrassed by my inability to see the little white commas, that I couldn’t find any eggs. Dan did a quick search and I was surprised to discover that I was right — there were no eggs in this hive. We would have to look for the queen.

  My stomach jumped. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for, except that the monarch would be larger and longer than the other bees. The worker bees and drones seemed to know what we were up to; they started frantically moving around the hive as we dug deeper, pulling out all the frames, our eyes inspecting each body.

  Then, suddenly, there she was. Her elegant black figure was moving discreetly around the bottom of the hive. I pointed her out to Dan.

  “Good eye!” he said approvingly, though I was sure he saw her long before I did. I took the compliment anyway, even as I felt a twinge of regret about the fate that awaited her. I didn’t want to have to watch Dan kill a queen, and I was relieved when he pointed out the lengthy cells dripping from the bottom of the frame. The colony would take care of this problem on its own.

  We repeated the process of pulling out frames and searching for eggs with each of the hives. After a while I realized that something was missing. A really big something.

  “It’s too early in the season to have a lot of honey at this point,” said Dan, anticipating my question. He pointed to a hive behind him. “See that third, shorter box on top of the two brooders? It’s called a honey super. You place a barrier between the brooders and the supers that’s just large enough for the worker bees to slip through but too small for the queen, so she can’t lay any eggs up there. That’s where they deposit the honey and encase it in wax. The colonies that really thrive end up with four or even five honey supers by late August.”

  His dreamy voice trailed off. “We’ll save that one for last,” he said, and we reluctantly pulled ourselves away from the hive.

  We worked side by side for another hour, searching for eggs and queens, eggs and queens, until at last Dan called me over to the hive with the honey super on top. I felt a rush of greedy excitement when a sudden thought occurred to me.

  “Don’t they need honey to survive the winter?” I asked. “I thought that’s why they made it in the first place.” I was concerned. Were we stealing from the bees?

  “Oh, they make more than enough honey to survive,” Dan assured me. “The rest of what they make is like a gift to us. We give them a place to live comfortably, and in return they leave us a sweet treat.”

  With that, he scraped out a piece of honeycomb that had stuck to the underside of the lid and handed it to me.

  “And they won’t get angry?” I asked. Without waiting for a response, I cautiously slipped my hand out of my glove and grabbed the dripping piece of comb, fat with honey. I turned it around in my hand to make sure it was clear of bees, lifted my veil, and then bit down. The warm honey drizzled into my mouth and the wax melted between my teeth. I grinned at Dan and briefly imagined the day when I would harvest honey from my own hives.

  Bees hummed around my exposed head, but all of my fear dissolved as I stood there in bliss under the scalding sun. This was a gift worth a thousand stings.

  How Animals Sell Vegetables (and Make You Tired)

  * * *

  BY LYNDA HOPKINS

  With her husband, Emmett, Lynda Hopkins owns Foggy River Farm in Healdsburg, California. They sell sustainably grown produce and eggs through their CSA and at farmers’ markets. Lynda is the author of The Wisdom of the Radish, a book chronicling her farming adventures.

  * * *

  Sedona’s kids were sitting low in her belly. Overnight, the ligaments around her tail head had softened, then disappeared entirely. I was checking her every hour.

  At eleven in the morning, when I came into the barn and sat down beside her on the straw, she got up and laid her belly across my lap. She didn’t make much noise — just a few ladylike grunts, verging on coughs — as she started to push.

  I called Emmett, my husband and farm partner, on the phone; he was across the road at the vegetable field. I told him Sedona was starting to get serious.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m just finishing up some seeding. I’ll come back in a few minutes.”r />
  Right after I hung up the phone, an amber bubble appeared. I called Emmett back.

  “Come now!” I said. “I can see the hoofs.”

  Emmett arrived just as the first kid, a gold-and-white miniature replica of Sedona, slid into my hands. I suctioned the mucus out of the kid’s nose and mouth, checked under the tail —a doeling! — and put her in front of her mother.

  Ten minutes later the second kid was born. In the adjacent stall, Tuxedo — our inimitable herd queen and Sedona’s best friend — was wondering what all the fuss was about. She put her front hooves up on the hog panels that separated her from her friend, craning her neck to get a look at whatever on earth was happening. When the wobbly wet kids tottered over toward her, she snorted. You could see the shock written on her face: Where did they come from?

  And although Tuxedo wasn’t due for a few days yet, she got right down to business. Chalk it up to jealousy, sisterhood, hormones, or all of the above: By that evening, Tuxedo’s kids had dropped into position and her ligaments were so soft that I could reach my fingers all the way around her spine. More noticeably, every time I left the barn, she screamed bloody murder.

  So I spent the night with her, and the following morning Tux successfully ushered her own pair of baby goats into the world. Two sets of doe twins: Our girls had done well.

  After she’d passed the placenta and the kids had each gotten their first drink of colostrum, I glanced across the stall at Emmett. Stuck to his face was a huge, stupid, dumbstruck grin. I realized I had one, too, and it occurred to me that we enjoy spending time with our animals for many of the same reasons our customers do.

  The quintessential farm — that romantic ideal that rests in every child’s heart — isn’t just a silent field of vegetables. It’s the cock crowing well before dawn (ours have a penchant for 2 A.M., and/or whenever anyone in the house gets up for a midnight pee). It’s the ewe lowing out in the field, calling for her misplaced lamb, and the livestock guard dog barking ferociously at the neighbor’s taunting cat. It’s the low clucking of dozens of chickens scratching through the grass and the soft grunt or shrill scream of a goat giving birth. And best of all, it’s the scamper of tiny hooves across the barn floor each spring.

  We’d timed it well: three goats due within days of one another, and all of them due less than one week before our big spring open-farm day. But there was just one problem. By the time Blossoms, Bees, and Barnyard Babies — the countywide open-farm event — rolled around, our third milk goat, Elizabeth, was still very much pregnant.

  Which meant that, rather than having three mamas and their babies on display in the barn, we would have something that looked a little like a “before-and-after” segment. In one stall lay Elizabeth, her belly spread fatly across the straw, while in the neighboring stall frolicked Tuxedo, Sedona, and their four doelings.

  On the day of the open farm, we started work at six in the morning. And it very nearly wasn’t enough time.

  * * *

  Best of all is the scamper of tiny hooves across the barn floor.

  * * *

  All the little dangers we avoid daily — wire protruding from the fence here, slippery mud there — had to be taken care of before visitors arrived. We put down wood chips and fenced off places we didn’t want visitors to go. We crafted signs that would welcome people, explain the “Things to Do” on the farm, and direct visitors toward the barn. We set up an animal table with goat, sheep, alpaca, and chicken feed for sale in little labeled Dixie cups. (This, we knew from experience, was far better than giving away food for free because there’s always at least one child who will grab handfuls of food and fling it on the ground repeatedly. This way there’s no wasted money, and less wasted feed, because parents are less likely to buy a second cup for a food thrower.)

  Once the animal table was set up, we transformed our farmers’-market table into a display of information about our CSA program and pasture-raised eggs. We made yet another table for the sale of last season’s winter squash. And then, the icing on the cake: We rearranged the hay bales in the barn to form stadium seating, as the space in front of the stalls would become a stage for a series of three workshops on goat care.

  People, of course, started showing up twenty minutes before the opening time of 10 A.M. We didn’t mind, though. Children and families poured into the barn and pasture, petting goats, asking questions, and writing their names and e-mail addresses onto a sheet we’d prepared.

  Throughout the day, cameras went off like crazy, snapping photos of children holding tiny goat kids. Human mothers gazed at overfull Elizabeth with sympathy. (“I remember feeling like that” was the universal sentiment.)

  At the appointed workshop times, the barn filled with people eager to learn about goat care. We distributed “grow-your-own-cheese” handouts we’d created, which gave fun facts about Nigerian Dwarf goats and their care. We went over the key components of a birthing kit, and how to tell when a goat was about to go into labor. And, naturally, we invited kids and adults alike to try their hand at eking a bit of goat milk out of an honest-to-goodness udder.

  After cuddling with goats and tossing sunflower seeds to chickens, some visitors signed up on a waiting list for goat kids. Others signed up for our vegetable CSA, and still others purchased our winter squash, asked when the local farmers’ market would be open, and promised to find us there.

  Our adorable goat kids weren’t just selling themselves; they were selling produce, too. It seems to me (and, in fact, to many of the people who visited) that a farm isn’t a farm without this: the classic kids-with-kids moment, when a human child experiences a sudden rush of maternal affection toward another kid, one with four hooves and nibbling lips. In that moment, the human child realizes that the creature he’s holding is not a stuffed toy, but instead a baby — a tiny thing, dear, helpless, needing protection. It’s almost as miraculous as the sudden presence of another being in the room, that brief moment after birth when everyone becomes aware that what was once one is now two. (And then three.)

  It’s not just the children who are affected, either. Grown men and women sat transfixed by the baby creatures curled up asleep on their laps. It wasn’t just children asking parents “Can we take him home?” but wives asking husbands and husbands asking wives. (We encouraged all the newly minted goat addicts to visit the farm again, and noted that we bring baby goats down to visit for on-farm pickup days at our CSA.)

  Although animals are a lot of work — and hosting open-farm days are even more work — there is a payoff. A good farm nourishes not only the body, but also the soul. Our animals give customers the gift of the imagined farm from their childhood: the romantic ideal of a farm, one they can visit and enjoy without having to muck out stalls themselves. For us, this isn’t just a neighborly or a poetic thing to do. It causes some customers to choose our CSA in the first place, and keeps other customers coming back year after year. And watching both adults and children become giddy in the presence of baby goats nourishes our souls as well.

  This partly explains why we raise Nigerian Dwarf goats and Babydoll Southdown sheep. We chose these smaller farm animals for a reason: They’re less intimidating than are their full-size counterparts, and they’re breeds known for their friendly personalities. Our sheep and goats are kid-size, and backyard-farm-size, too; because of that, we can teach customers how to milk their own goats and make their own cheese, or how they can keep a couple of sheep to mow their lawn. Because our sheep and goats are small and thus easy to transport, we incorporate our animals into farm activities whenever possible: “chicken bingo” at farm parties, goat kids and a livestock guard puppy at the CSA pickup, and an open-farm day one week after kidding begins.

  Visitors had been lingering, hoping that Liz would get down to business and have her babies during the open farm. But at five o’clock, we closed up shop. The last visitors made their way back to their cars. One woman, before leaving, gave us her phone number.

  “If she goes into la
bor in the next couple of hours, would you mind calling me?” she asked. “My son really wants to see the newborns.”

  But it was not to be. Liz went into hard labor without dilating, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t fit more than one finger past her cervix. Soon I found myself driving eighty miles an hour down the highway with a laboring goat in the back of my station wagon as we rushed her to the Cotati Large Animal Hospital at ten o’clock on a Sunday night. By the time we got back home, got the kids to nurse, and ate a simple dinner in the barn, we’d been running around for eighteen hours straight. We hadn’t eaten anything other than a hasty snack since six in the morning. But we had a story that we’d remember for a long time — one we’d tell to customers at the farmers’ market, some of whom would approach us to ask about Elizabeth long after her wethers had been weaned and sold to new homes.

  Even more important than the stories and the misadventures of life on a farm (which customers love to hear) is this simple message, given freely from a five-day-old goat kid to a five-year-old child: We’re a farm; we’re your neighbor. And all the little miracles of life that happen on a farm are here waiting for you, whenever you want them.

  Two Farmers, 350 Chickens, and a Hurricane

  * * *

  BY KRISTEN JOHANSON

  Kristen Johanson lives and works on Blackberry Meadows Farm in western Pennsylvania, where she raises pastured poultry and helps run an organic-vegetable CSA. Four years ago she and her husband, Nate, made the decision to start a more sustainable life as farmers. They haven’t looked back.