Oh geez, more bees!

Caution, talk of animal reproduction inside.

May 08, 2026

You are regal.

You are dignified.

Even if you occasionally put your foot in your mouth.

It’s called balance.

— Puck

Here’s What’s Happening at Good Spirits Farm

If I had one piece of advice for new homesteaders and backyard gardeners, it would be this: plant asparagus. Do it first thing.

Right now, I should be up to my eyeballs in flats of spindly tomato starts and worrying whether my cabbages are too small to withstand the onslaught of cabbage worms. I’ve grown so used to marking the passage of time in farm tasks that I feel slightly disoriented this year of pausing garden operations.

But thank goodness for asparagus. A perennial that takes several years to establish, it comes up without fail in late April—even if I forget to douse it with compost (like I did this year). It’s giving Farm Baby his first experience of eating what he’s picked. He loves the satisfying snap of harvesting the spears from the garden so much so that I have to stop him from harvesting the tiny stalks that aren’t ready yet!

Because you can’t not bee-keep, the way you can pause a garden, I’ve been hard at work splitting bee hives, in an attempt to keep ahead of swarm season.

There is no fast way to do this. You have to pull the whole hive apart, assess how much capped brood and eggs are available, and then divide resources between what will become the new hive and what will stay behind.

It’s best, and fastest, if you can find your queen and move her to the new hive. That, of course, is easier said than done—especially if the hive is just bursting with bees. This pic is from a rare hole-in-one hive where the queen was on the very first frame I pulled. Can you find her?? (Hint: she is longer, and has a more caramel-colored, carrot-shaped abdomen.)

I got to this hive just in time, as they’d already started building a new queen cell for swarming. (It’s the peanut-shaped cup at the top of this frame.)

A healthy hive should split. But swarming is a nightmare to deal with. You never know when or where they’re going to go. Proactively splitting majorly reduces the time you spend chasing your bees around, trying to re-capture them.

Of course, I didn’t get to all of my hives in time. Last Saturday, I walked out to find two swarms just hanging out.

I got lucky in that both went to easy-to-get-to locations. Within an hour, I had relocated them to new hives.

The funny thing about this time of year is that, no matter how hard I plan, I never have enough equipment on hand to deal with all the new colonies. And so, at least for the moment, I’ve become the bee slum lord of Fentress County, using plywood and tape to keep these hives going.

Here’s What I Loved This Week

Gimlet, who has absolutely had it with Petey and Julia’s bullsh*t.

Spring, and love, is in the air. Last week, I went out to find that Gimlet had let herself out of the hotwire fence. I put her back in. She let herself back out as I was walking back to the house.

This was weird behavior. The herd was on primo spring grass, and she was moving herself into a section they’d already grazed. This wasn’t a grass-is-greener issue. After the third jailbreak, I grabbed a halter and led her in the barn, figuring I could keep a closer eye on her there, in case she was unwell and just not showing obvious signs yet.

The next day, she seemed fine, so I took her back to her friends. Then I realized the issue: Julia was in heat, and it had ignited an all-out love-fest. When cows go into heat, they’ll mount other cows. And, of course, the male cattle mount them. It’s just a lot of chasing and humping. Gimlet, who carries the dwarfism gene and is therefore much smaller than the others, was quite simply, tired of the orgy.

I put the halter on her, took her back to the barn, and let her wait out Julia’s wild heat cycle. Whomst among us hasn’t been like, " Wow, this party was fun, but now it’s getting weird. Please, I would like to not be here anymore? Relatable, Gimlet. Relatable.