Meanwhile, Back At The Horse Show

Unbelievably, I do not have not much more to share with you than to say we had a really good time at the Indiana Combined Driving Event and Frankie did an amazing job.  I headed to dressage and cones on Saturday without my phone/camera and Tim was volunteering on Sunday so he wasn't able to take any pictures that day :-/.  

Tim did take video of dressage and cones, but he has an Android phone and I have a "real" phone (ducking ;-) and I don't have a good way to get his videos over to my phone.  Luckily Auntie Reg took a video of our dressage test and we were able to just push a button and ding, there is was :-).

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Everything we did this year was better than we did last year.  Well, except for the stop watches.  We somehow did even worse with the stop watches this year and will be purchasing new watches for next year!

Frankie drove a really solid dressage test and we were in first place after that.  I hit one cone, the very last one, and we were a couple of seconds too slow so had 6 penalty points in cones.  For marathon Frankie was much stronger and faster this year and drove all of the hazards fearlessly, but we were still too slow and dropped to second place at the finish.  I'm still very proud of him and how well he did this year.  

Onwards!

A New Butterfly

I've never before been able to spot a chrysalis out in the "wilds", but I have found two this year!  Both have been on the milkweed in the raised beds, but I'm suspicious there was one in the B Garden as well as I found a newly hatched butterfly out there one morning a week or so ago.

This chrysalis was on a rapidly browning leaf and as I watched the leaves around it drop to the ground I decided to pluck this one and put it somewhere safe until it was ready to hatch.  They have to hatch in the air so they can dry their wings as they expand.  Opening on the ground it would not have survived.

My original plan was to move it back to the raised bed just before it opened, but as I carried it out there I saw a bunch of birds and decided to keep it on the Wool House porch, about 40' from where it was laid.  That worked out okay for the butterfly as no predators grabbed it and good for me because I was able to watch and take a time lapse video.

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I did a video of it going into chrysalis, but the iPhone speed is too fast and it was hard to see.  

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For the hatching time lapse I found out I could use iMovie to edit the speed and I may go back and edit this video as well.  I think it's fascinating!

Welcome to the world, little girl.  You can tell it's a girl by the thicker black lines and the lack of two black dots on her lower wings.  

I have picked up the other chrysalis and attached it the the drying rack on the porch as well.  The old milkweed is fading fast.  Next year I'm going to "mow" it after it blooms so it sends up new growth before the late summer butterflies arrive.

Telling The Bees

Once upon a time a good beekeeper saw that the bees in one of her hives were getting ready to swarm.  She watched them gathering outside their hive and, with no way to stop them, watched them fly away.  They swirled up into the sky and landed in a nearby tree, 40 feet in the air.  

She was pretty good at gathering swarms, but that was far too high.  "I can't take care of you up there," I heard her tell them.  "You need to come back down."

An hour or so later she called to tell me the bees were going back in.  (?!?)  I got back up the hill just in time to watch the last bees crawl back into their old hive.

The next day they re-swarmed into a different nearby tree, about six feet off the ground.  We easily gathered them into a cardboard box and installed them in a new hive. She stayed to make sure every bee found their way into their new home.

Tomorrow I will go up the hill to tell the bees.

Stella Martin

August 16, 1923 - September 1, 2022