Milking, Bee update, and Future

For the past 2 weeks, I've been in "training" learning to milk a friend's miniature goats, as I will be milking while she is on vacation. It is MUCH harder than I thought it'd be, as their teats are very small. Also, this 6am milking thing is.... well...tiring. I'm usually up at that hour anyhow to let the hens and dogs out, however I head right back to bed afterwards (it takes all of 10 minutes). No so easily done after being up for a while milking.  So I'm tired. And I suck at milking.  It's a very slow learning curve.

The bees are well, I recently had to add another box to the hive to make room for all the brood.  Yesterday we checked their progress, and have moved up into the new box and are drawing it out. What is drawn out in the new box is filled with brood.  With the weather warming, they are taking less and less of the sugar syrup and will probably stop completely over the next few weeks with the increase in pollen (i.e. protein) availability. Also, as you can see in this video, the entrance reducer probably needs to come off soon. You can see lots of pollen being brought into the hive!

Lately, I have really been wanting to add one of the automatic doors to the coop that are on a daylight sensor, and open/close automatically at the appropriate times.  This would make the chickens even LESS work, and make me feel like they are secure at night from predators when we go away for the weekend. However, they are expensive (several hundred dollars).