The goats' go to snack is pine needles. They love crunching them and inhale them like little goatie vacuums. To the delight of our herd, Seamus enjoys "trimming" the pine trees in the boys' secret forest. After discovering that he clipped heaps of branches, we had teaching moment about photosynthesis and how trees need their leaves (needles) to "breathe". In the future Seamus has promised to only clip dead branches. Too bad for our snack lovin' goaties.
Our chickens were loving some overgrown microgreens today. There is nothing like some fresh greens in a sea of springtime mud. We should get extra nutritious eggs tomorrow!
We also did our first hive inspection of the year and fed our honey bees some snacks. I cleaned the dead bees off the bottom boards, scraped off the mould that grew over the winter and gave each hive half a pollen patty and some sugar cakes.
We went into the winter with five hives and have had four survive. Two are very strong and two are weak. They ate up a lot of the honey they had stored up even though we left them with lots extra. I see the workers are already finding pollen in nature and bringing it back to the hive. I saw lots of ladies sporting pollen pants during my inspection. There is no nectar for the worker bees to collect until the spring flowers bloom so we will need to keep feeding them sugar cakes or syrup for a while yet.
What kind of snacking have you been up to during social isolation? I will bet it isn't pine needles, microgreens and pollen patties, though sugar cakes is a possibility...
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