Her Majesty’s English Tea Room at Fairchild’s and Third Bee Swarm!

Thirty three years ago, I gave birth to the most beautiful baby girl! Today my brother Eric and I took her to Her Majesty’s English Tea Room at Fairchild’s in Dunlap, Illinois, to celebrate her birthday.
Not only is it a delightful tea room, but it also is a beautiful store to shop at, with many wonderful things and darling decorations. This was a taxi and one of the teas party’s they offer, can actually be served in the taxi! We are considering that for Michelle’s birthday next year. More pictures of the taxi…

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Eric had a dream come true, and got to pose with Prince William and Kate.. (look at that adorable little flower fairy apron in the foreground!)
The tea, itself, was delicious and the presentation was gracious and elegant. Michelle and I had lovely tiara’s and Eric had a coronet.

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At the end of our wonderful tea, Michelle was presented with a meringue cake and a little singing bear:)
 

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Happy Birthday Michelle! I love you  so very much!
We also stopped at a plant nursery and saw some gorgeous things and sweet fairy gardens, but I will save those for a different post and share about the swarm instead! We had no sooner than got home and I got a call to come get a swarm. I called Eric, who is crazy and helped catch this swarm in his flip flops, shorts and sleeveless shirt, (see I have been telling you swarms are gentle!).  The hive had been in this guys tree but he had thrown firecrackers and I suspect other things from the amount of injured bees on the ground when we got there. Anyway, the bees had came and settled on his table umbrella and it took us awhile to figure out the queen was on the inside of the umbrella!

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When we got the hive to Eric’s house and reopened it to put in the rest of the frames, the bees were making a bridge between the frames we had in there. I thought you might enjoy seeing this phenomenon.
 

                             Eric and the new hive!!
 Herbal and Honey Hugs to all who visit Comfrey Cottages xx

Buzzzzz-y Busy

I got a phone call the other morning that made my heart sing! A man in town had a bee swarm in his yard and was asking me to come fetch it! Free bees! It is hard to see it well in this picture, but that dark spot is a the swarm!
Luckily my son Tommy was home, so he came and helped me:) And took this picture of me
 

Swarms are extremely gentle. They keep balled up around their queen, while scout bees fly off looking for a new home. Later, I went back to where I got this swarm and found a cluster of scouts who had returned to where there swarm had been. Imagine if you had told your family you would go off in search of a new home and when you returned, they were gone! So sad to even think about so….
I went and retrieved them and reunited them with their family:) You see the queen’s scent was still there, and they would have just stayed right there until they died! I thought these little sacred lived deserved being cared for and brought to their family:)
I have a friend named Jim, who is in my beekeeping group. He bought a package of bees and I went to help him hive them. Package are one way you can buy bees. They come in a screen box, which has a sugar water can inserted in it to keep the bees fed while in transit. The queen is in a tiny screen box inside this package. One end of her cage is plugged with a candy, that the bees will eat and eventually release her.
  Jim had his beehive all put together and ready. We just removed some of the center frames and then poured the bees in, after removing the sugar feed you can see in the center of the top of the bee cage. It looks like a can of veggies or something..


  This is the queen cell, Jim is holding. He used the hive tool corner to break up the candy plug just a little bit more. We hung this cell between some frames and soon the workers will have ate out the plug and released the queen
 The bees that didn’t pour/shake out were left sitting right outside the entrance. It wasn’t long until they marched out and joined the rest of the hive.
We got the veg garden tilled this weekend
We garden at my nephew Scott and his wife Dawn’s house. Scott was so patient teaching Grandson’s Evan and Breven how to run the tiller
 

Gerald and I went to the Civic Center in Peoria to see Red Green this weekend. Visit the link if you are unfamiliar with this comedian. Gerald has been a great fan of his for years so he had a great time:)
 We had one bummer this week though. We found a woodpecker in our yard that had a broken wing. We kind of guess it was probably hit by a hawk. We were going to try and heal and rehabilitate it to re-release it.. but it passed away within an hour of us finding it:( Must have been hurt worse than we could tell, although Gerald didn’t hold out good hopes for a full recovery to its wing to begin with..


On an up note…. Gerald gave Dylan his very first duck call. Dylan is always wanting me to drive Papa’s truck, as Gerald has duck calls hanging from the rearview mirror. Well, now he has his own:)
 Dylan had some sort of tubing that he was forever using to try and holler at the geese in the fields on the way to school in the morning. So cute, he will roll his window down and just start blowing and blowing this homemade thing trying to get their attention. When I told Gerald, he thought it was time he had a real one:) Quite the big little man now!
We went to the river this week, and I got some of the herb gardening done, but I should save those things for another post as this one has got quite long!
Herbal and Honey Hugs to all of you who visit Comfrey Cottages xxx

Elderflower Cordial and a Roadtrip

I had a chance to harvest some elderflowers and try the lovely elderflower cordial recipe, my sweet friend Rita shared with us:) It is so delicious!

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My hubby, Eric and I took a daytrip and first went to Burlington, Iowa where we saw something weird. The mayflies had hatched and there were piles of them either dead or dying everywhere around the visitor center!

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Weird huh? There were still a lot of them flying all over the place!

We then decided to go back over to the Illinois side of the Mississippi River and take The River Road to Navoo.

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My favorite historic building there is the apothecary and variety store

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We had been to this historic village before, so I had just wanted to briefly swing into revisit this apothecary and revisit their medicinal gardens. Was I disappointed! They had ripped out all their huge mature plants and put in new ones, which were really more annual types so not near as interesting to me:( Also, Eric found right on the outside of the gardens a trap with a poor raccoon which had obviously been in there a long time and was very thirsty, hot, and probably hungry! So inside the building I tromped to raise hell and insist someone let the poor thing go, and if they must trap and release them, to check their traps more often! ggggggrrrrrrrr!

Poor little fellers big offense was raiding trash cans! I suggested those folks might do better to bunge strap their cans, then to trap and torture poor critters! These building are by a river and a woods, for pete’s sake! Do they really think raccoons won’t try and raid their cans?!

I frankly was glad to get out of there after that, so we just travelled on down the river road, looking at this and that until we ended up at Quincy, Illinois. There we discovered an unusual building Villa Kathrine, so we took a tour.

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So a little bit of herbal deliciousness and a glimpse at our road trip:)

Big herbal and honey hugs to all who visit Comfrey Cottages xx

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