[i]It's the final countdown! Tudu duu duu, tudu dututu![/i]

With the radio in the cab of the Massey Ferguson 1135 tractor playing quite loudly, the tall freckled human woman Sasha was cheerfully rocking out while doing her work on Butterfly Farm. More time had passed, and with it, things had actually returned to normal. Scratches had healed, psychological trauma had been overcome, and it was all thanks to the farm. The work stopped for nobody, the animals didn't take a break for anyone, the work had to be done every day and left little time to dwell on things best moved past.

The chocolate Labrador girl Millie had returned to the tiny village of Rolling Hills and her work in the Stebbins General Store, and had taken with her the rabbit hutch and metal mesh panels for a run she had built together with the purple and white vixen-taur Buddleia, setting them up in the backyard of her small cottage so they would be all ready for when the lop-eared female of the litter of baby bunnies that had been born would be old enough to be separated from her mother and live on her own. She had also taken with her quite a generous amount of elderberry jam, goat milk and small goat cheeses and even a jar of honey from Cherry Blossom Farm, plus the cheerful experience of meeting Butterfly Farm's new neighbors, the white and orange Dutch Spaniels Marian and Margot Witteveen who had dropped by for a visit during the time Millie was still staying at the farm. Her reaction upon first seeing the two slender, small-ish and almost delicately-built canine women had been much the same as Buddleia's first reaction; without being able to help herself, and even forgetting to be initially awkward at the two Spaniels being as naked as the three of them were, she had blurted out how adorable they looked, causing Marian to blush and her daughter Margot to grin cheerfully and return the compliment, which in turn caused Millie to blush - so they were kind of even. The light brown canine girl was also indirectly responsible for a bit of bonus trivia to be revealed; constantly calling Sasha and Buddleia "mom" and nursing from Buddleia during their evening cuddle-time while Marian and Margot were visiting had prompted Marian to admit she still nursed her daughter as well, despite Margot being in her early thirties already, doing it for the relaxing and bonding experience that it was - and she had even let Millie do it as well.

The fluffy purple and white vulpine taur Buddleia had been very productive. She had felled several trees from the small forest covering the hill behind their large shed, to straighten out the border of the field that ran behind it, as well as several loose-standing trees in the large stretch of ground between the re-routed dirt roads to the left of their farm, which now also belonged to them. All the trees had been brought to the sawmill to be processed into building materials, and while she was there waiting for the work to be done, Buddleia had also arranged for Fred to drop by with the large stump grinder vehicle to remove all the tree stumps from that large stretch of land and from the straightened bit on the back of the low, forest-covered hill. She had also taken down the rickety open shed next to the small old farmhouse, and with the metal support posts and roof trusses plus all the extra materials from the processed trees, the fluffy vixen-taur had built a large new shelter with a plank floor behind the old double silo for both their combine harvesters to sit in, along with the header trailer, the bale trailer and all three of their trucks; the 1953 MAZ-200 flatbed truck, the 1959 Skoda 706 RT grain truck and the 1949 Berliet GDR W grain truck which had been part of the amazing package deal of second-hand equipment they had gotten from the Ag Co-op.

In preparation for turning the middle left grass field back into a crop field in the new year, Buddleia had also felled a number of trees from the patch of trees between that field and the dirt road running along the left side of the farm. All those trees had also been brought to the sawmill, initially just to sell them, but they had been turned into building materials after a slip of the tongue from the brown beaver man Fred. In a bout of slightly detrimental honesty, Fred had let it slip that the beams and planks sawn from the logs they brought in would fetch about three times as much money as the logs themselves, and the building materials could be sold to the Ag Co-op, both the flour mill and the oil mill - who would make pallets out of them - and to several enterprises in the village of Rolling Hills. It was a very simple decision to have each and every log processed into materials from that moment on. Plus, Buddleia did need a lot more building materials, as she was by far not done building things yet.

Another fairly sizeable shelter with a plank floor was erected at the front of the farm grounds, next to the pen of Choco the goat, in which the ripper plow, cultivator, weeder, seeder and planter were stored, along with the Fiat 1300DT tractor, and the vulpine taur also attached a roof on supports to the side and part of the front of the large shed to shelter the slurry spreader and park the Massey Ferguson and John Deere tractors under, leaving the inside of the large shed free for the rest of their smaller equipment; the open Hanomag Perfekt 400e tractor, the tedder, the windrower, the old sickle bar mower as well as the large batwing mulcher, the small baler and the bale wrapper. Plus a couple of large, sturdy, wide shelving racks Buddleia had built to hold, amongst others, the boxes with rolls of plastic wrap and the boxes with rolls of baling twine. Butterfly Farm was getting more neat and organized and sprawling by the day!

The freckled human woman Sasha had been expanding her knowledge, in several manners. Helping Buddleia with the building of the structures, she improved her capabilities in carpentry and welding, and spending a good amount of time behind her laptop, she continued to educate herself on different types of crops, different ways to home-process wild and home-grown fruits and vegetables, and ecological, sustainable ways to care for crops and improve their yield, without making a negative impact on the environment, but rather by working in tandem with it. Spending a good amount of time in the downtime between work walking through the fields and along the forests surrounding their farm with Buddleia, Sasha even learned to read the weather and interpret the signals given off by the clouds, the sky, the breeze, the wild animals and birds and insects and even the flowers. Of course, her senses were not as sharply developed as Buddleia's, but she made good progress with the capacities she had.

Some learning had been put slightly on a backburner for a little while. Still interested in apiculture, Sasha did want to learn as much about that as she could, and take all the time needed to properly learn about it, so she decided to let the idea sit until after the next grass harvest. Without being aware of it, all the work they had been doing had let the days creep by towards the end of November, and soon they would be needing to spend over a week of almost non-stop work bringing their October batch of silage bales to the BGA plant and mowing, windrowing, baling and wrapping the grass in all three fields to the left of the farmhouse, the long field to the right of the forested hill and the pond, the very long field between the dirt road running behind their farm and the elongated, narrow forest further northwards, and also the new stretch of land between the re-routed dirt roads to the left of their farm. After that, there would be another three weeks of downtime; that would be the best time to learn new things.

But first, the more urgent work needed to be taken care of. There already was an interruption planned; the UFA, the University for Forestry and Agriculture in the city of Enfanor, had gotten in touch with Sasha to arrange a visit to Butterfly Farm, so they could view the land and talk about the experiment with the newly developed super fast-growing trees. And as the city of Enfanor was well over a week's travel away from the Arfajia Valley, that was not just an appointment, but a commitment. It had been a successful visit, however. In the last week before the October silage bales would be ready, a small delegation from the university had arrived in what looked like an oversized RV which turned out to be a 2015 all-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van converted into a large mobile laboratory with sleeping capacity for four people. Sasha and Buddleia had shown them around the farm, the extra tract of land between the re-routed dirt roads to the left of the farm and in particular the corner and bend along the rocky plateau they intended to use for the trees, where the biologists had taken a large amount of pictures, ground samples, and even collected some data on the direction of the sunlight and the wind.

Finding the area very suitable, the biologists made several arrangements with Sasha and Buddleia, on providing them with saplings of the trees, instructions and assistance on how, and how far apart, to plant them, any possible extra care the trees might require in their first year, and an agreement that no encroachment would be made on the time and work of Butterfly Farm itself; Sasha nor Buddleia would need to monitor the trees and collect data on them, the university would station a small team nearby to do all that specific work. Sasha in her turn brought the delegation over to the sawmill and introduced them to Fred and Frank, to show them where the trees would be processed into woodchips and possibly some soft lumber. That, in turn, led to Fred and Frank offering the biologists full use of one of the two small houses on the yard for the time they needed to be in the area, giving them a space to park their mobile lab and a building with much better sleeping arrangements, a full, functional bathroom and toilets, and a kitchen, as well as the possibility to collect even more data on the quality of the resulting products after the trees had been processed. They all parted ways in high spirits, leaving a promise of excitement hanging in the air; come April, the valley would become a test bed. Exciting times were ahead!

Something rather strange also happened. A few days after the university biologists had left, Sasha was checking the silage bales, giving each bale a tally mark and noting their moisture content, temperature and PH value while Buddleia took care of Choco the goat. The weather forecasts looked rather dreary for the days to come; while even in the winter season, the temperatures in the northern half of Minnaluna remained between the mid-60s and low 70s, precipitation became more prevalent. The real heavy rainfall and severe storms would only occur during the Minnaluna hurricane season, over April, May and June, but the winter season could see some quite unpleasant weather as well.

It would actually require very precise planning along with the ability to drop everything and rush into another job at a moment's notice for the silage work Sasha and Buddleia did on the farm. Mowing the grass in their fields could be done in any kind of weather, providing the rain didn't come down too hard and flatten the grass, but the baling of the grass and especially the wrapping of the bales would need to happen on an almost opportunistic basis. Too much moisture in the grass bales would make for soggy silage that would rot rather than ferment, meaning that after the grass had been mowed, they would need to monitor the weather very carefully and be ready to jump into the tractors to bale the grass and immediately wrap the bales between rain showers - and similarly, stop the work right away as soon as more rain would fall and let the grass sit to air out enough after a shower.

Checking the purple-wrapped bales under the shelter by the end of the middle left field, Sasha constantly looked up at the gray, overcast sky. There were still several days before the bales would be ready, and theoretically, that was when they would start on a new batch of mowing and baling, but perhaps they could get a bit of a head-start on that in the few days the current bales still needed to sit, depending on the weather. The tall human woman however shook her head with a sigh as from the direction of the large mountain range, a long-drawn rumble of thunder rolled across the sky. Well, that would bring a stop to the work of that day.

A frown of surprise wrinkled Sasha's forehead when Buddleia, on her way to the underground bunker with the bucket of goat milk, suddenly stopped dead at the rumble of thunder, with her bushy tail stiff, her ears pricked up sharply and her bristly whiskers fanned out and twitching, then suddenly broke into a full gallop and disappeared into the small building over the opening of the bunker. Now that was odd... Finishing her checking of the last bales, Sasha walked over to the small building and descended the wide steps down into the underground room, looking around.

In the secondary room, all lights were blazing. Buddleia was huddled in the far corner of the room, her quadruped lower body pressed into the corner, her eyes squeezed shut and her paws over her ears. Sasha blinked again, walking over to the visibly trembling vulpine taur and laying a hand on her shoulder.
   "Hey babe, what's the matter?"
   "Is thunder, Sasha," Buddleia squeaked in a high-pitched whine.
   "Yeah, I heard that. So?" Sasha shrugged. "It's almost winter, we'll get that kind of weather now. What's the big deal?"
   "Is thunder!" Buddleia squeaked. "Is gonna be lightning! Is bad! Is evil!"
Unable to help it, Sasha held a hand over her mouth to muffle a chortle.
   "Oh come on now, you're not gonna tell me the big, strong, confident fuzzbutt is afraid of a little thunderstorm?"
Buddleia opened her eyes and made a grimace.
   "Is not funny, Sasha!"
Sasha shook her head with a smile, wiggling the fingers of her other hand through Buddleia's long purple hair.
   "Well, see, that's where you're mistaken, fuzzbutt. I find it a bit unbelievable, and kind of amusing."
Buddleia snorted a sound in between a yelp and a growl.
   "No! Is not funny! Is bad! I upset!"

Without another word, the purple and white vixen-taur suddenly rose to her four feral feet and trotted out of the underground room. Sasha blinked again, tilting her head as she could hear the front door of the small farmhouse slamming. Okay... that was beyond odd. Working as quickly as she could to take as little time as possible, the human woman filtered the milk in the bucket and set it in the freezer without even bottling it before also making her way over to the old farmhouse, looking around again as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

It took a moment or two before she found Buddleia, who was in the bedroom, shivering and trying to burrow herself under the heap of cushions and pillows they used as a bed. Sasha sat down on one of the pillows and lay a hand on the vulpine taur's upper shoulders.
   "Hey, come on now, sweetie, tell me what's the matter?" she said in a soft voice. "I'm really sorry if I upset you, I didn't mean to do that, but please tell me what's so bad?"
Buddleia just shook her head, burrowing even deeper into the heap of pillows with her eyes squeezed shut tightly again. Leaning over, Sasha wrapped her arm around the vixen-taur's upper shoulders and lightly petted at Buddleia's twitching ears with her other hand.
   "Babe, please now, talk to me? We gotta be able to talk about these kinda things, work them out to make sure we don't accidentally, unwittingly, hurt or upset each other, you know?" More or less subconsciously, her voice adopted the lowered, smooth, comforting tone she had learned to use in the tantric massage salon she had once worked at. "If there's something that's bothering you, babe, I want, I need to know about it, so I can be more careful about it in the future, and help you with it if I can. So please tell me what's wrong, babe. There's nothing bad about a little thunderstorm, now is there?"
   "Yes, is," Buddleia's voice came a bit muffled from between all the pillows.
   "Then what is it, babe?" Sasha gently coaxed. "I wanna help you, comfort you if I can, but I can't if I don't know what you feel is so bad. I mean, it's just weather, right? We get even worse weather than that in the spring, in hurricane season, so what could possibly be so bad about a little late autumn thunderstorm?"
   "Is bad. Is evil. It..." Shivering harder, Buddleia muffled a whimper in one of the pillows, along with a couple of barely heard words. "...kill parents."
   "Fffuck..!"

With a gasp, Sasha drew her breath and clapped a hand over her mouth. Whatever she might have expected, [i]that[/i] most certainly was [i]not[/i] it. In all the time they had been together, Buddleia had never once even mentioned her parents; it had appeared as if the vulpine taur had no memory of them as she had been raised by her grandparents. [i]This[/i] was... a shock to say the least.

Slowly letting go of the breath, Sasha pressed herself up against Buddleia's side and ran her fingers through the vixen-taur's purple hair again.
   "Fuck sweetie, I'm [i]so[/i] sorry. That suddenly makes all the goddam sense, that you hate thunderstorms. When did that even happen? You never mentioned your parents before."
Another whimper was muffled in the pillow.
   "I not wanna talk about." Very lightly turning her head a bit, Buddleia partially opened one eye to look at Sasha. "You wanna know, talk to sheriff. I done talking."
   "Then we don't talk, sweetie," Sasha murmured calmly, wrapping both her arms around Buddleia's upper shoulders. "C'mere, I'm here, I'm with you. I ain't going anywhere, babe, I'll hold you and pet you all damn day and night if needed."

Buddleia let go of the pillow, wrapped her arms and her feral forepaws around Sasha's tall, lanky form and buried her muzzle and face into the human woman's freckled chest instead. All through the rest of the day, until well after the mild thunderstorm had passed, they remained in a close embrace in the pillow-nest, with Sasha continually running her hands up and down along the back and sides of Buddleia's upper body and through her long purple hair, ceaselessly, tirelessly. The physical contact, the anchor that Sasha provided, along with the calm, comforting petting and the steady, repetitive brush of Sasha's breath against the vulpine taur's ears as she held her cheek nuzzled against the top of Buddleia's head, eventually succeeded in calming Buddleia back down.

Well into the evening, they had a bowl of soup and a sandwich, if only for the reason they had to eat something. But their bath in the pond was skipped, even despite the weather long having passed by again. They just went right back to the bedroom and burrowed into the pillow-nest in a close embrace, and Sasha kept gently petting Buddleia until she felt the fluffy vulpine taur sinking into the relaxation of slumber. She followed shortly after, not breaking the embrace throughout the entire night.

The next few days, life and work proceeded as usual. A day or two of random showers of rain hindered the work they could do, but as all the bales were done fermenting, they took their time loading all of them up on the flat deck of the old MAZ truck and the bale trailer. With the first cut of grass from the stretch of land between the re-routed dirt roads added to the grass cut from the fields to the left of the farmhouse, the field to the right of the pond and the large long field alongside the dirt road behind the farm, they had produced a very impressive total of 555 bales. At the price the BGA paid them per bale, that was over 116 and a half thousand dollars they were stacking on the back of the truck and on the bale trailer - although Sasha did calculate they would get less, as this time, they would also take a tankful of the digestate the silage would generate as they now had a slurry tanker to fill. Or at least consider it.

Both of them were a bit quiet while loading the bales, as it was both hard work, and Sasha was trying to calculate the amount of income they could expect. There was one large hole in the human woman's variables, however; she had no idea how much digestate the silage would generate. Oh well, but that was not all that much of a problem; most likely, all the silage they were bringing would generate way more digestate than they could fit in the slurry spreader, so they would still get a decent price. And besides, they still couldn't even use the digestate yet; it would not be until June before the winter rye was ready for harvest, so those fields could not be fertilized until the next summer. The other fields, if they were going to plant sunflowers, could be done earlier, but still not until April at least - so they would not even need any digestate for a good four months yet. But in any way, it couldn't hurt to ask the German Shepherd woman from the BGA, Darla Simones, for any specifics so they would at least know what to expect.

Despite both the truck and the trailer being stacked quite high with the small purple-wrapped bales and a continuous drizzle being released from the overcast sky the next morning, Sasha ran down the dirt road at a decent speed. Fast enough to reach the hill upon which the Ag Co-op sat in three and a half hours. They did make a stop at the livestock dealer, but the Appenine hare man Simon told them they still had plenty of silage in stock to last a month or two or three, so they could continue right on to the BGA plant. Parking the truck and trailer by the single rectangular building among all the round buildings with their domed tops and announcing themselves at the reception counter, they were received by the maroon and salmon-orange German Shepherd woman in a quite cheerful manner - coming there monthly with a batch of silage bales had made them familiar enough with one another they were now on first-name terms.
   "My two favorite suppliers! Good morning! How much did you bring me this time?"
Sasha let go a light chortle.
   "Five hundred and fifty-five bales in total, Darla. But I do have a question this time."
   "Of course!" Ms. Simones nodded with a smile. "Do tell, how can I help you?"
   "Well, I'm curious," Sasha chortled. "We have five hundred fifty-five bales of five hundred liters of silage. How much of that digestate does that generate? We have recently acquired a slurry spreader, and come spring, we're looking to plow up some of our grass fields to plant sunflowers. So by that time, we'll actually be taking some of the digestate from our silage, but I have a feeling the amount of bales we get from all our current grass fields will generate much more digestate than our spreader can carry."
   "Right, right!" Ms. Simones nodded, pulling near a notepad and beginning to scribble on it with a well-chewed pencil. "Let's see now... five hundred and fifty-five bales of five hundred liters. Divided by two, is... two hundred seventy-seven and a half, times a thousand makes two hundred seventy-seven thousand, five hundred liters of silage. After processing, you're left with about forty percent of the total volume in digestate, so that would be... let's see now... divided by zero point four, is... a hundred and eleven thousand liters even."
   "A [i]hun[/i]... holy jumping shitballs!" Sasha blurted out.
   "That's quite a decent bit, ain't it?" Ms. Simones chortled.
   "I'll say!" Sasha agreed. "Jeezus, our spreader can only hold nine and a half thousand liters! We could fill it ten times over, and still have enough left for about a tank and a half!" She shook her head and grinned lightly. "Also, I'm mighty impressed you calculated that on paper rather than with a calculator."
   "I know my arithmetic," Ms. Simones chortled.
   "In that case, I'm going to put you to the test," Sasha sniggered.
   "Bring it on, Sasha," Ms. Simones said with another chortle.
   "Right," Sasha nodded, leaning on the desk a bit. "At our first visit, you told us you pay two hundred ten bucks for a five hundred liter bale of silage, or a hundred thirty if we also take the digestate it generates. At the full price, I calculated a hundred sixteen and a half thousand dollars for five hundred fifty-five bales. But now suddenly it's March, we've done our last cut on all our grass fields, and we'll bring that amount of bales for the last time because the next batches will be much less with some of our fields turned into crop fields. So here we are, with five hundred fifty-five bales, and we'll only take one tank of nine thousand, five hundred liters of digestate back with us." She grinned and tapped the notepad with a fingertip. "What's the price we will get for our load of bales in that case, considering we'll only use the digestate of a small amount of those bales?"
Ms. Simones laughed shortly.
   "Okay, that's a good one! I will need a little more time for that, so give me a moment here."

She started scribbling some pretty long sums on the notepad, mumbling to herself under her breath and every now and then tapping the pencil against the side of her muzzle. It took several minutes, during which Sasha and Buddleia calmly sipped the tea they had been offered, but eventually the maroon and salmon-orange German Shepherd woman looked up with a triumphant smile. 
   "Alright, got it!" She held up the notepad. "Nine thousand, five hundred liters of digestate is forty percent of twenty-three thousand, seven hundred fifty liters of silage. That comes to forty-seven and a half of your bales. We pay a hundred and thirty dollars per five hundred liter bale if you take the digestate, so for forty-seven and a half bales, that comes to six thousand, one hundred and seventy-five dollars. And that also means that from a full batch of bales, there will be five hundred and seven and a half bales left that we pay the full price of two hundred ten dollars for, which comes to a hundred and six thousand, five hundred seventy-five dollars. And that will make a total price of a hundred and twelve thousand, seven hundred fifty for the whole batch, as opposed to a full price of a hundred sixteen thousand, five hundred fifty dollars for five hundred fifty-five bales with no digestate taken." She drew in a deep breath and grinned. "Hahaaa!"
   "Fuck me sideways!" Sasha laughed, shaking her head cheerfully. "God [i]damn[/i] that's impressive! I can do math pretty decently, but you definitely got me beat, Darla!"
   "We have lots of things to calculate here on a daily basis, and it has to be pretty precise, so I've learned to be good at it," Ms. Simones chortled. "I actually practiced a lot, because I wanted to be able to do it by hand for any occasion the computers might be down."
   "It's definitely a lost art," Sasha sniggered. "When I lived in the city, I've seen it happen more than once that cashiers in a supermarket were completely stumped when the registers stopped working. Hell, ask them what is three plus two, and they already whip out their damn phone, haha! Dare I even ask you to calculate how much digestate we might need on our fields?"
   "You can ask that, but I will need the exact dimensions of your fields to calculate that," Ms. Simones chortled. "And even then, it still depends on a number of unknown factors exactly how much you will be needing. For instance, if you're going to be using it as a complete replacement for solid fertilizer, you will need quite a lot of it as you'll need to give the field a pretty thick spread of the stuff. So depending on how large your fields are, you may well go through a full tank of it on just one field."
   "Wow, okay, I never even thought about that," Sasha said with a light chortle. "What kind of solution could you give us in case we need more than one tank full of the stuff? Because we only have the spreader to transport it, and it's four hours from our farm to here, and four hours back. So it's not exactly like we could run back and forth a few times a day to refill our spreader."
   "Well, for one, you can always buy extra digestate, and we only charge forty bucks per one hundred liters, which comes down to the eighty bucks less we pay per bale if you take the digestate," Ms. Simones smiled. "For another, we have a few semi trucks here with tank trailers that hold forty thousand liters. You can refill your spreader four times from one of those and still have some left; two thousand liters, from the top of my head. I could rent you one of those for five hundred bucks a day if you'd want."
   "Alright, yeah, that would be a viable option," Sasha nodded. "I mean, hell, from one full batch of our bales, we'd still be able to fill a tanker like that about two and three-quarter times, and I kind of doubt we would even empty one full tanker over the fields we're aiming to plant crops in next spring. In any way, I'll definitely be keeping that offer in mind, Darla, thank you." Her lips curled into a mild grin. "And for now, I'll be more than happy to take the hundred sixteen and a half thousand bucks for our load of bales."
   "Yes! Is so much money!" Buddleia nodded happily, showing her upper canine teeth and the tip of her tongue in a smile. "I never get so much money in once from crops!"
   "Then let's go pull our telehandler driver off his fluffy-tailed ass and get your truck and trailer unloaded, shall we?" Ms. Simones chortled, rising to her feet.

They all stood up and walked out of the office. Ms. Simones leaned through a door to call out at someone, before leading the way further out of the building. As they walked over to the old lavender truck, Sasha smiled and leaned against the trailer for a moment.
   "I actually have another question for you."
   "Go on, shoot," Ms. Simones smiled with a gesture of her paw.
   "Dan found us all the equipment we were looking for in a package deal, so come spring, we'll be planting a lot of sunflowers. A [i]lot[/i] of them," Sasha smiled. "He pointed out that the harvester he found for us could possibly produce rough straw from the sunflowers, and he mentioned that you might be willing to take that off our hands?"
   "Ah yes, corn straw and sunflower straw is too rough for bedding, but it can be used to make decent TMR," Ms. Simones nodded with another smile. "And we'll be happy to take it as well." She pointed at one of the large round domed buildings which had a large rectangular building attached to the side of it. "In that hall there, we have a chopper and a pelletizer. We chop up such rough straw and press it into pellets, which are then fed into the burners in that round building. So we'll be happy to take that straw, or any kind of straw you may produce, and we pay between a hundred sixty and two hundred fifteen per thousand liters depending on the season."
   "That's good to know," Sasha smiled. "You may actually see us bringing a truckful of straw bales by the end of next season."
   "Any time, Sasha," Ms. Simones nodded with a smile again, pointing at a telehandler with a square bale grabber on it driving over to the one of the domed buildings that had the unload area with the gantry crane. "Looks like Brian's all ready for you, so let's get you moved over there to unload all these bales of yours, shall we?"
   "We shall," Sasha nodded with a chortle.

She got into the old MAZ truck and slowly drove it and the trailer over to the one domed building with the gantry crane she had become quite familiar with over the past several months. By directions of the albino rabbit telehandler driver, she parked the truck and trailer transverse in front of the gantry and started helping Buddleia undo all the ratchet straps holding the bales to the trailer. The white-furred rabbit man deftly manipulated the bale grabber to pick up several stacks of the small purple-wrapped bales from the trailer, swinging the telehandler around to set the bales down in the offload area and even stacking them back up. He even managed to reach all the way across the trailer to pick up the bales at the very front of it, as the arm of the telehandler - as the name of the vehicle implied - telescoped to extend a good amount.

Once the trailer had been emptied, Sasha drove the truck forwards and Buddleia disconnected the trailer from it, after which Sasha parked the truck back in front of the gantry again. The bales on the back of the truck were unstrapped as well, and the albino rabbit man just as deftly picked them up and set them down in the offload area. When all the bales had been unloaded, Sasha drove the truck back over to the trailer, Buddleia re-attached it, and the truck and trailer were parked back by the rectangular office building. In the office, the maroon and salmon-orange German Shepherd woman did some typing on her computer and printed out a receipt for Sasha that showed the transfer of $116,550 into their company account.
   "Well, that definitely makes up for the forty-two grand we had to sign over to the Co-op for that load of machinery the other day," Sasha chortled as she folded up the paper after checking it and shaking paws with Ms. Simones. "Always such a pleasure doing business with you, Darla."
   "Yes! So much money!" Buddleia chirped happily, clapping her paws. "Farm never make that much money in once! Thank you much, Darla!"
   "No need to thank me, you're the ones doing all the work to make all that silage we so badly need and drive it four hours over here," Ms. Simones chortled. "Heck, I should be thanking you, and maybe the people in Rolling Hills as well as we generate the electricity for there, among others."
   "Them being who they are and the way they've taken me up in the community is already more than enough thanks," Sasha smiled. "Although that does bring another question to my mind. If you generate electricity for the village here, I'm assuming you have a bank of capacitors around here somewhere to store all that electricity?"
   "Sure do," Ms. Simones nodded. "All the way to the right of the yard, behind that aluminium panel wall, we have a whole substation sitting there from which power lines run to Rolling Hills. But they're underground, so that's why you can't see any power poles running from here to the village."
   "Right," Sasha nodded with a smile. "Well, on our farm, we have this old windmill. It used to be a water pump, like all those mills usually are, but Leia showed me that her grandfather had it converted to an electrical generator, and there's actually part of an old capacitor bank from a substation in Bronto Valley connected to it to store the electricity. We also got a couple solar panels we connected to it, but I had been wondering if it would be possible to increase the storage capacity. Is that actually a possibility?"
   "Sure," Ms. Simones nodded again. "Those capacitor banks come in modules, and it's not too much of a job to add one or more modules to your existing bank. The biggest problem would be getting those modules, but I could help with that if you'd need because we have connections with Minnatricity, the power company that operates and maintains the main power grid for the country. And of course, you'll need to have room for extra modules."
   "Right, well, I guess that would have to be reviewed, and our current capacitor bank would need to be checked for compatibility, because it's like four decades old," Sasha said, nodding thoughtfully.
   "That shouldn't be too much of a problem, those capacitors don't usually change a lot over the years," Ms. Simones smiled. "If you want, I could send Dennis, our electrical engineer, over to your place sometime to have a look at your bank and give some suggestions."
   "When we're ready to expand, I'll take you up on that," Sasha smiled. "In any way it's good to know the possibility is there, I'd been wondering about that." She shook paws with the canine woman again. "Thanks again, Darla. And for now, I guess we'd better get our butts back to our farm so we can get out of these darn clothes, heh. And we should also make the most of the weather for the coming few days so we can get a new batch of bales ready for you."
   "I'll be looking forward to that, and if you were to deliver them in your usual farming uniform, I'd definitely be looking forward to that even more," Ms. Simones chortled.
Sasha laughed and shook her head while getting up from her chair.
   "Unfortunately, I wouldn't count on that, Darla. But hey, you could always accompany this Dennis fellow to our farm, or just drop by sometime to have a look at our operation and our dress code," she grinned.
   "I may do that sometime, who knows," Ms. Simones chortled, seeing Sasha and Buddleia out of her office and shaking paws with them again. "Have a wonderful day, ladies, and see you next month."

They waved and said their goodbyes, getting back into the old MAZ truck. As it was close to suppertime by the time they got back to the farm, they just parked the truck and trailer and walked up and down the driveway a bit, so Sasha could point out the ideas she had come up with for the location of a bee box and the plan to make a small coneflower field on the right side of the driveway and plant several large flowering bushes, turning the strip of land between the driveway and the large pond into a sort of wild garden that would both look very pretty and colorful, and be massively beneficial for both bees and bumblebees as well as all kinds of butterflies, ladybugs and even hummingbirds. Buddleia happily clapped her paws again at the ideas, pointing out that there used to be hummingbirds visiting the farm.
   "Grandmother have garden of paradise bird bushes for them! Yes! And larkspur and prairyfires and all kinds! So pretty!" She poked Sasha's shoulder. "We get lots wildflowers too! For bubblebees! Lots wildflowers here, and some in grass fields, with plenty clover! Yes! So very pretty, clover good for hay too, and very good for bubblebees! I like bubblebees, they so round and fuzzy!"
   "[i]Bumble[/i]bees, you crazy fuzzbutt you!" Sasha laughed. "But you're right, we should attract those as well, and the clover is a good idea regardless. And hummingbirds will be nice, some parks in Fossil City had feeders for hummingbirds, so I've seen them around, and they're insanely pretty."
   "Yes! We make farm so pretty! Lots flowers!" Buddleia nodded happily, making a wide swooping gesture with an arm, from the cluster of boulders by the open area in front of the large shed all the way towards the fence at the front of the farmgrounds. "All this, all flowers! Lots lots flowers! Yes! Seeds and bushes, is gonna be so pretty! We do, Sasha, yes!"
   "Oh we will, don't you worry about that, fuzzbutt," Sasha chortled. "I'll have a talk with Melody and Nathalie and have them order me a bunch of flowering bushes and shrubs and flower seeds, and I'll even ask Dan if he can get bags of native wildflower mix." She playfully poked Buddleia back. "But for the next coming few days, we're first gonna work hard on getting the grass mowed and baled, fuzzbutt! There's at least four days without rain coming, so I need you to follow me with the wrapper while I bale the grass after cutting it, and we'll do a field at a time and work into the night if we have to."
   "Of course! Yes! We do!" Buddleia nodded cheerfully, swaying her bottlebrush tail and repeatedly tapping Sasha's hips and butt with it. "Is okay if is rain when we pick up bales, but we first get bales done so they all good and give us lots more money! Yes!"
   "Hell yeah, I even prefer a bit of rain while collecting those bales, because it's a nice help in keeping cool while doing that hard sweaty work," Sasha sniggered. She playfully patted the rump of Buddleia's quadruped lower body. "Now go on, let's get inside and get some food started! It's past suppertime already and I'm hungry!"

Buddleia giggled in several rapid staccato yips and wrapped her bushy tail around Sasha's waist while trotting over towards the little farmhouse, more or less pulling the lanky human woman along with her. A slightly late dinner was prepared and enjoyed, followed by a quick bath in the pond, drying and brushing, and some cuddling in the pillow-nest so they could naturally fall asleep for a relatively early night.

Over the following several days, the two of them did work very hard, as at the start of every month. Getting up earlier than usual, they had a breakfast of warm porridge and skipped their morning bath in the pond and cuddle-time so they could get an early start on taking care of the animals and have more time to do all the work in the grass fields. Sasha hitched the batwing mulcher behind the John Deere tractor so she could mow at a quicker pace, followed by Buddleia on the open Hanomag tractor with the windrower, raking the narrow double swaths of grass into single thicker swaths, giving the grass just enough agitation to lose the excess moisture. They started on the large, elongated field adjacent to the dirt road behind their farm, as with the size of that field, it took them a full day to mow it. Due to the size and location of that field, they had given it the designation of Field 6. The next day, Sasha made her intersecting laps across that field in the MF 1135 tractor with the baler behind it, again followed by Buddleia on the open Hanomag tractor now pulling the bale wrapper to wrap all the bales Sasha produced. That again took them a full day, even working into the darkness of the night to get it all done before bedtime.

All the other grass fields were worked in a similar manner. Over the course of a full day, Sasha mowed the three fields to the left of the farmhouse, designated Fields 1, 2 and 3, and half of the tract of land between the newly re-routed dirt roads to the left of the farmgrounds, followed by Buddleia raking the grass into neat windrows. The following day, Sasha mowed the other half of what she had designated as Field 5 and the entirety of the long field to the right of the pond, designated Field 8 - as the field behind the copse of trees behind the farmhouse was designated Field 4, and the field to the right next to that, covering part of the hill behind the double silo and running along the dirt road, was designated Field 7. While the freckled human woman was doing that, Buddleia already started baling up the grass in Fields 1, 2 and 3 and the already mowed half of Field 5, which gave Sasha the time to wrap those bales the next day while Buddleia raked the grass in the other half of Field 5 and all of Field 8. That gave them a final full day of work baling and wrapping the grass in the second half of Field 5 and all of Field 8. With their early starts, longer nights and the compromise of skipping an extended breakfast, lunch and dinner with cuddle-time afterwards in favor of just having their morning porridge, some sandwiches on the go in the tractors and soup with bread or stew in the evenings, and only having a bath in the pond at the end of the workday, they actually managed to get all the grass mowed, baled and wrapped in less than a week - and well before the rain returned. Efficiency!

They did wake up to the steady, rhythmic patter of rain the day after they had finished all their work. Having their porridge breakfast indoors and their cuddle-time on the beautiful and very sturdy sofa they'd had custom-made in the village, they again decided to forego on a morning bath in the pond as they received a natural shower from the rain anyway as they walked down the dirt path running between the fields to the left of the farmhouse and over to the tract of land between the re-routed dirt roads which was unofficially Field 5, but which would likely turn into Field 5a and 5b later as Sasha had mentioned she was planning to divide the large tract of land with a dirt path to make more manageable fields. There were also still a number of bushes in that field, alongside the dirt road - some of which Sasha had managed to identify. Flowering quince, smokebush and buttonbush, weigela, mahonia, even some abelia and bluebeard, and several forsythia and witch hazel bushes; all bushes that would flower very well, and many of them also had very pleasant scent.

The thing was; in order to cultivate that tract of land and make arable fields, the bushes were in the way. But with the plan Sasha had laid out for the strip between their driveway and the large pond, they could save the bushes and get a head start on their wildflower garden.
   "Alright fuzzbutt, here's a nice thing for you to do today," the freckled human woman smiled as they walked up and down Sawmill Road. "All these bushes here have to go, but they're all healthy flowering bushes, so we gotta save them. This weather is actually pretty much perfect to transplant them, so I want you to pull all these bushes out of the ground here and plant them in that strip between the driveway and the pond, okay? Plant them wherever you like, no need to be organized about it, just put them down randomly. Just make sure to stay far enough away from those young cherry trees Millie gave us, okay? And of course, keep that dirt patch free, because we'll plow that up later to make a coneflower field."
   "Yes! I do, Sasha! I make all pretty, save all pretty bushes, yes!" Buddleia nodded with a cheerful smile that showed her upper canines and the front end of her dark pink tongue.
   "Good," Sasha smiled with a chortle. "Take your time, you can take all day if you want to. I'm going to the village today, pick up our mail and revenue, have a bit of a talk with Melody and Nathalie about getting more seeds and bushes, and I'll be spending the whole rest of the day talking with Jasper and getting educated on keeping bees."
   "Okay, is good, yes!" Buddleia nodded again. "You learn lots! We get bees! Maybe we get box for bubblebees too?"
   "I don't know if they even nest in boxes, but I'll ask Jasper about that, okay?" Sasha chortled. "I'll try and be back not too long after suppertime, but if it's gonna take longer, I'll call you so you won't have to wait for me with supper. And I'll bring something nice from the bakery either way, we deserve that after all that work we churned out the past few days."
   "Yay! Okay! Get apple frizzles please! I like apple frizzles! They so yum!" Buddleia chortled with several gleeful yips, clapping her paws.
Sasha cheerfully shook her head and tickled under Buddleia's chin with two fingers.
   "God you're nuts. Well, have fun playing with those bushes, and I'll see you tonight, my big soft nutso fuzzbutt."

They walked back to the small old farmhouse, where Sasha stepped inside while Buddleia continued on to the large shed to put a spade in the small trailer attached to old Emmie, the 1948 Chevrolet Fleetline, and drive it over to what now was Field 5 so she could dig up the bushes and put them in the trailer. Drying herself, brushing her long ginger hair a bit and putting on a pair of shorts, a long-sleeved button-down shirt, her beach sandals and the pink sun hat with the two ribbons dangling from it, Sasha waved as Buddleia drove past the farmhouse in old Emmie and got into her 1956 Citroen 2CV AZU delivery vehicle. Keeping the throttle pinned to the floor, she managed to reach the tiny village of Rolling Hills in a bit over three hours despite the rain and the dirt road being a bit muddy. It was almost a record.

She worked through all the stops she had to make methodically. First, the post office where she picked up their mail and had some friendly smalltalk with the elderly mouse postmistress Mrs. Dobbart. Next, the general store where she picked up the revenue from the sales of their jam and goat cheeses, some groceries, and had a cheery conversation with Mrs. Stebbins and Millie. A quick stop at the bakery to pick up some apple fritters, a mini loaf of corn bread and a regular loaf of whole-grain brown bread sprinkled with sesame seeds, and a small bag of bran cookies sprinkled with sugar. Quick stops at the greengrocer and the butchery as well, to pick up, respectively, a small cauliflower, two cucumbers, a bunch of carrots, a jar of shelled peas and a few small red onions, and some spiced sausages, two beef tenderloins and some mutton cutlets, and a fine liverwurst.

The rest of the stops all took a bit longer. At the new flower and plant shop, the Botany Boutique, Sasha was greeted quite exuberantly by the two fuchsia-pink and white leopardess sisters, Melody and Nathalie Diouf, who almost knocked each other over behind the counter with the spreading wide of their arms in greeting.
   "Sasha! How nice to see you! Do you need more herbs?"
   "Hello dears," Sasha chortled lightly. "No, the herbs are doing amazingly well, and I have plenty for the time being. This time, I need flowers, lots of them, and a bunch of advice."
   "Of course!" Nathalie, the larger of the two sisters, smiled brightly. "We'll be happy to help, honey!"
   "Do tell, honey, how can we be of assistance?" Melody, the smaller one, smiled just as brightly.
   "Honey is the whole trigger," Sasha chortled, leaning against the counter. "We have a crapton of elderberries, and we already made a bunch of them into jam, but we're still up to our ears in them. I wanna start making syrup out of them, but for that I need honey, and to give it a good shelf life I also need to make coneflower tincture to mix into it. I've already been thinking about keeping bees to make our own honey, and I think we're about at the point where we can actually do that."
   "That's lovely!" Melody smiled. "Beekeeping is very rewarding, we used to do it back in Sparkletown, where we're from, as well."
   "And your elderberry jam is amazing!" Nathalie smiled. "We got a jar of it at the general store a few days ago, and we already went through the whole thing! It's delicious!"
   "I'm glad to hear that," Sasha nodded with a smile. "So anyways, I've been looking at the options for beekeeping, and I've come with a plan. We have a very long driveway, and a very large pond, and between those is a strip of ground that is perfect to turn into a wildflower garden. Plus there's this rectangular patch of bare dirt, I think some kind of shelter or shed or something used to be there, and that is perfect to turn into a full coneflower field, because I will also need lots of them to make the tincture with. So I'll be needing lots of coneflower seed, and I'm not talking those packets for domestic gardens, I'm talking a commercial scale amount."
   "We can do that!" Nathalie nodded. "We can get seed in five and ten pound bags, for many kinds of flowers."
   "And the best part is, it's mixed cultivars, so you'll get a good amount of variety as well," Melody added with a smile. "Plus of course, we can get you several related perennial bushes you can plant near that small field as well, like black-eyed Susans for instance."
   "That's what I'm looking for, yes," Sasha nodded. "Because it's quite a stretch of ground to cover, so I want both mixed native wildflowers I can seed all over the place, and shrubs and bushes I can plant that will stay there all the time. Now, I can get native wildflower mix at the Co-op, I happen to know that kind of seed is sown in large quantities because it's used for berms and the verges of rural roads and such, so you don't need to bother with that. But what I need from you ladies is the coneflower seed, and shrubs and bushes and whatnot."
   "Of course, that'll be relatively easy!" Melody smiled.
   "Is there anything in particular you'll be looking for?" Nathalie smiled.
   "Yes," Sasha nodded with a smile as well. "Of course I want flowering shrubs and bushes that will be attractive to honeybees, but also to bumblebees, butterflies and hummingbirds. So that's where I will need your advice."
The two feline sisters turned to each other and started pointing at each other with giggles as they alternately called out varieties of plants.
   "Buddleia!"
   "Hibiscus!"
   "Camellia!"
   "Inga!"
   "Centropogon!"
   "Heliconia!"
   "Jacaranda!"
   "Digitalis!"
   "Monarda!"
   "Verbena!"
   "Alright alright!" Sasha interrupted them with a cheerful laugh. "I recognized some of those, and I agree with all of them! Can you get all of those?"
   "Easy!" Nathalie nodded cheerfully.
   "When do you want them?" Melody smiled brightly.
   "Not for several weeks, perhaps even a few months," Sasha smiled. "I'll know more after I've been thoroughly educated on beekeeping, so I will let you know later, alright? But in the meantime, go on ahead and put together a list of what you think will be best, and which plants will do best in this valley. It's highly likely that I will have you order the entire list for me when the time comes."
   "You got it, honey!" Melody smiled brightly again.
   "And we'll be looking forward to your next visit!" Nathalie added with a chortle.
   "I'm sure you will, next visit I'm gonna be spending a bunch of cash in your shop after all," Sasha sniggered. "But I'll be glad to. Anyway, have a lovely day, lovelies, I should go and get educated by our local beekeeper now."

They waved at each other cheerfully as Sasha walked back to the front of the store and stepped outside. Before crossing the dirt street and walking to the crafts store, however, she first turned left and walked past the diner and the tavern. There was another stop she should make first, and she wasn't particularly looking forward to it, but it needed to be done.

A little way past the diner was the sheriff's station. Hesitating for just the slightest of moments, the freckled human woman opened the door and stepped inside, walking over to a counter behind which was an amazingly beautiful silver-white Burmilla cat woman in a purple, blue and white uniform; the deputy sheriff Eleonora Seeley. She looked up and smiled at Sasha.
   "Ah, hello Sasha. Nice to see you. What can I do for you?"
   "Hello Eleonora," Sasha said with a light smile. "I'd like to have a talk with sheriff Rosco if possible."
   "Of course, just a sec," the silver-white feline woman smiled, getting up and stepping over to a door on which she knocked before opening it and sticking her head around it. "Leroy? Sasha's here to see you."
   "Come on in," rumbled a deep voice from behind the door.

The deputy sheriff turned to Sasha and made an inviting gesture with a paw. With a nod and another smile, Sasha walked over to the door and stepped into the office behind it. By the window was a heavy desk, with two chairs in front of it, and seated behind it was the large, heavy-built three-colored Basset Hound man Leroy Rosco, the sheriff of the tiny village. He put down some papers and creased his jowls into a friendly smile, gesturing at one of the chairs on the other side of the desk.
   "Good day, missus Farr. Have a seat, what can I do for you?"
   "Good day, sheriff," Sasha smiled, sitting down. "Something strange happened recently, which has left me with a question I was told you could answer."
   "Of course, what is your question?" the canine man rumbled.
   "Well, you see, the thing is this," Sasha said with a light smile. "Last week, we had this thunderstorm drifting over. Leia reacted quite unusually to it, running into our cool-room and cowering in a corner, and she got quite upset when I quipped about her being afraid of thunder. Now, for one, I have never seen her upset, and especially not with me. For another, I talked with her, trying to learn what the problem was, and after a while she mentioned that a thunderstorm killed her parents." Leaning on the desk a bit, Sasha looked at the canine sheriff seriously. "She has never before even mentioned her parents, I knew no better than that she had no recollection of them whatsoever as she has been raised by her grandparents. She also flat out refused to talk about it, but she did mention that if I wanted to know, I should talk to you. So I'm hoping you can tell me what the hell happened."
   "Ah. Yes... That is a trauma for the poor woman, missus Farr," sheriff Rosco rumbled, his sagging jowls making him look as morose as he sounded. "You see, when Buddleia was a young little girl, she and her parents and her grandparents all lived and worked at Silvercreek Farm, your farm. When she was four years old, Buddleia was enrolled in the school here in town, and the way they arranged it was, her parents brought her to town on Monday morning in this very long station wagon they drove, all through the week she would stay in town under the care of missus Murray, Ralph's mother, going to school every day and having a home in the tavern every evening and night, and on Friday afternoon, her parents would pick her back up and go back to the farm to spend the weekend there. Quite a good arrangement, really." He paused for a moment, running a paw over his muzzle and closing his eyes. "One day, early spring, when she was five, her parents picked her up on Friday afternoon to go back to the farm. Now, you've driven that road plenty times by now, missus Farr, so I'm sure you're familiar with that stretch where the forest comes all the way up to the side of the road, right there by that very large boulder we call Hippo Rock."
Sasha nodded silently.
   "I know the place, and I dread what's coming next."
   "With good reason," sheriff Rosco nodded with a deeper rumble. "There was a thunderstorm, and as they drove on that stretch of the road, lightning hit a tree in the forest, quite close to the road. It pretty much exploded instantly, and the blast plus the wind pushed over a few more trees. One of those fell right over the road, right on their car, crushing in the entire front end. Now, as it was a long station wagon and there were no seats in it, Buddleia was spared because she was all the way in the back, but her parents must have been killed instantly. And because it's such a long way from here to Silvercreek Farm, down such a deserted road, no one knew about it. It was only a few hours after suppertime when her grandfather, Phlox, set out to see what was keeping them, because he and his wife got worried about them not getting back to the farm. That's when he found them, Comfrey and Zinnia, Buddleia's parents, dead, and Buddleia with some cuts and scrapes but otherwise unharmed, screaming for her parents. Poor thing musta been trapped in that wreck for hours and hours and hours."
Sasha held both her hands over her mouth and nose, looking at sheriff Rosco with her gray eyes wide behind her glasses and breathing slowly.
   "Fff... fucking hell..! That's... horrific!" She slowly shook her head. "God fucking dammit, no wonder she reacted the way she did and got so upset. Goddamn, that poor, poor fuzzbutt! That's terrible!"
Sheriff Rosco nodded slowly.
   "I was a greenhorn deputy at the time. Next day, Phlox came to town to report what had happened, so we went out to the site. It was damn ugly. Took weeks before Buddleia was back in school, and for more than a year Verbena, her grandmother, had to drive her into town the long way around, via the northeast side, because when she went on the main road, Buddleia started screaming."
   "No fucking shit," Sasha breathed, also nodding slowly. "Jeeeee-zus..." She took off her glasses and pushed her fingers into her eyes for a few moments. "I was afraid it was gonna be something terrible like this. But nevertheless, I'm glad you told me, sheriff, I'm glad I know it now. It'll let me understand her even more, and be able to comfort her, or at least try better."
Sheriff Rosco nodded again and put one of his large paws on Sasha's shoulder.
   "One thing you should also know, missus Farr. When Phlox reported the incident, he insisted we tell nobody what had happened. And we never did. The folk here in town, they only know Buddleia's parents had an accident, but not any details. Only miss Swift, who was Buddleia's teacher, and preacher Brown, both of whom are not here anymore, knew the details, plus us at this station of course. So I ask you to please respect that, missus Farr, and keep this knowledge to yourself."
   "Of course," Sasha said softly, putting her glasses back on. "You have my word, sheriff, and as Millie can tell you, my word is sacred. But thank you for letting me in on it."
   "By all means, you should know," sheriff Rosco rumbled. "And thank you as well." He sat back a little. "Can I offer you a cup of coffee after all this, perhaps?"
Sasha drew in a deep breath and gave a light smile.
   "Thank you, but no. I still have a lot of learning to do today, as we're planning to keep bees. So I'd better get to it."
   "That will be nice," sheriff Rosco rumbled, creasing his jowls into a small smile again. "So we may see Butterfly Farm honey in the general store before too long?"
   "Perhaps, who knows," Sasha said with another light smile. "I don't think we'd get more than one hive, just to produce some honey for ourselves and one or two of the products we're making. But hell, I have no idea how much honey even one hive can produce, so we may still end up with a surplus to sell."
   "Either which way, it will be nice to see more products from Butterfly Farm," sheriff Rosco rumbled. "I'll let you get to your learning, missus Farr. Do have a good day."
   "Thank you, and you too," Sasha nodded with a somewhat deeper smile.

She shook the Basset Hound man's large paw and walked out of the office, smiling and waving at the beautiful silver-white Burmilla cat deputy sheriff on her way out of the sheriff's station. Outside, the tall human woman lit a cigarette and sat down on a bench overlooking the small market square for a while to smoke it, just looking at the tiny village going about its business with a quiet smile. After another while, Sasha got back up and calmly walked back to the main dirt road, crossing it and walking down it towards the crafts store.

On the way, she first stopped by the dairy as she passed it. As she stepped inside, the three Argente rabbit sisters looked up and let out a playful cheer in greeting.
   "Sashaaa! Sasha Sasha Sashaaa! Sasha Sasha!"
Holding her hands over her ears, Sasha grinned and shook her head.
   "Will you knock it [i]off[/i]! Jeez! You bunch of crazy bunbuns!" She walked over to the counter. "Seriously, you sound like the flocks of seagulls in the Fossil City harbour when the fishing ships come in. Damn! Whatever the hell happened to hello, how are you, nice to see you?"
   "Hello Sasha," the creamy-orange Jeanine giggled.
   "How are you?" the silvery-brown Lucille giggled.
   "And nice to see you!" the silvery-blue Annette completed with a giggle as well.
   "Yeah yeah yeah," Sasha sniggered. "Much better. And cool your jets, bunbuns, I'll just be in and out, because I only have a question for you."
   "Of course, of course!" Lucille nodded cheerily.
   "Do tell, darling!" Jeanine chortled.
   "Yeah, what can we help you with?" Annette smiled.
   "Cheese," Sasha chortled. "You know those mini goat cheeses we make? That's just milk from our goat, without anything added to it. So what I wanna know is, could I add honey to it? Is that doable?"
   "That sounds yummy!" Lucille smiled.
   "Yeah, we never tried it, but you totally should!" Jeanine nodded.
   "Yeah, it's definitely worth trying, sweetheart," Annette nodded with a smile. "But it's gonna be tricky. See, if you mix honey into the milk, it's gonna make the milk very sticky, and that will make it very hard to form proper curds. But what you can do is wait until the curds have formed, [i]then[/i] add some honey, and mix it together when you press the curds into the molds. It may even be worthwhile to warm the honey first so it'll be runnier and mixes better. Like Jeanine said, we never tried it, so you'll just have to experiment a bit."
   "But do let us know how it turns out!" Lucille chortled. "I wanna taste it!"
   "Alright, well, guess I'll go play mad scientist for a bit in the near future," Sasha sniggered. "But thanks, darlings, I will let you know the results if they turn out good. For now though, I gotta go and get educated on beekeeping, so see y'all later, okay?"
   "Ooo, exciting!" Annette chortled.
   "Yeah, have a great time, sweetheart!" Jeanine smiled.
   "But do come back soon!" Lucille giggled.
   "I'll think about it, if you lot can stop imitating flocks of hyperactive seagulls," Sasha sniggered. "Bye now!"

With a cheery wave, the lanky freckled human walked back out of the building. Good grief, those rabbit sisters were always so exuberant! Still lightly chortling to herself, Sasha walked a bit further down the road, past the spinnery and into the crafts store. There was a calm bustle in the store; near the back, the black-furred Brush-tailed rat man Ruben Bekker was sitting behind a potter's wheel, throwing what looked like a quite tall vase, the yellow, ruddy and black-furred Norwegian Lemming woman Inga Fjelstad was on the other side, welding together some sort of fire basket, the lovely cinnamon and silver-spotted Ocicat woman Sonya Jonker was sitting behind a small workbench, carving an intricate figurine of a naked feline woman from what looked like a chunk of pink-ish marble, and behind the counter near the front of the store was the tan-agouti and white Mountain Hare chandler Kimberly Flores, making notes in a ledger.

All of them looked up when Sasha stepped inside, and the lapine woman smiled and lay the ledger aside.
   "Sasha, good to see you! What can we do for you, honey?"
   "Hey y'all," Sasha smiled. "I'm actually here to see Jasper and learn a bunch from him about beekeeping. Is he around?"
   "Nice!" Kimberly smiled. "Yeah, he's out back!"
   "I'll get him, gotta let this cool down for a bit anyway," Inga smiled, taking off her welding helmet and heavy gloves.
   "Guess I'll wait for a bit then," Sasha chortled as the lemming woman walked further to the back of the store and disappeared through a door.
Only a moment or two later, she returned, accompanied by the short-coupled Caspian tiger man Jasper Nicla who smiled as he walked over to Sasha.
   "We have an apiarist in the making, I hear! How can I help you with that, dear?"
   "Yeah, some of the produce we're getting is so abundant I'm looking into making different things with it, and for some of them I need honey," Sasha nodded with a smile. "I had already mentioned to Leia once that I would like to keep bees and produce our own honey, but since I've never done that before and I wanna do it right, I'm here to learn from the expert."
   "Of course!" Jasper smiled. "What do you want to know?"
   "Everything," Sasha chortled. "I'm a complete noob here, so you'll have to walk me through every step from the beginning, everything I'll need, how to set it all up, how to keep it happy, everything from plonking down a box to harvesting and bottling."
   "In that case, follow me to my office in the chandlery," Jasper smiled. "We can talk calmly there, and I have all my stuff there to show you everything you need to know."

He led the way to the back of the store and through a door on the left that led into the smaller side-building that housed the chandlery. In the back of that building was a kitchenette that doubled as an office, and the short tiger man gestured at some chairs while stepping over to a counter to put on an electric kettle.
   "Have a seat, dear. Cup of tea?"
   "Thank you, that'll be nice," Sasha nodded with a smile, sitting down in one of the chairs.
   "Be right up." Jasper set out some cups and a small silver teapot while the kettle heated up, filling a stainless steel tea infuser with some fresh blend and hanging it in the teapot. "I heard you started quite an extensive herb garden as well, did you? Bees love the heck out of that, I can tell you," he smiled, setting the cups on a desk the chairs were near, putting spoons in then and also setting down a small jar of honey, then pouring the boiling water into the teapot when the kettle clicked off.
   "Yeah, I need a good amount of thyme and scallion for a sausage recipe of my granny's, and I figured I might as well grow all the rest as well," Sasha nodded. "Nothing beats flavoring our home-cooked stew with some fresh home-grown herbs after all."
   "So true!" Jasper nodded with a smile, dipping and swirling the infuser in the teapot for a few moments, then laying it on a small saucer and pouring two cups of tea. "And with all that open land full of wildflowers around your farm, you're in an excellent location for keeping bees as well. I've been out that way once, you also have a quite big pond, right?"
   "That's right, we even got it stocked with fish, some sort of barbels or something that Dan got dumped in his yard and needed to get rid of," Sasha chortled while dripping some honey into her cup of tea and stirring it. "And there's a decently sized field in front of the house we've repurposed for the chicken coop and run missus Stebbins gave us, and a couple of large runs with hutches in them for the rabbits we got from Jameson. Still plenty of room left to lay in the grass there, and there's a cluster of trees all along that side as well which is perfect to give our chickens and bunnies some shade, and I'm guessing it'll be a good spot for a bee box as well."
   "Oh, absolutely," Jasper nodded with a smile again, also stirring some honey through his cup of tea. "Bees like it warm, but full sun is not good so you gotta give them some shade. So let's go through the basics first, then. Obviously, you're gonna need one or more hive boxes."
Sasha chortled while sipping her tea.
   "One will be enough, we're only just starting out from scratch and we're not looking to get rich from honey, it'll be more of a side-project."
   "One is never enough," Jasper chuckled. "You gotta have at least two. Even if you only harvest just the one, it's way better to have two so you can compare and give the bees an extra place to stay and establish themselves once they start swarming. Matter of fact, if you have two, you can alternate harvesting them to keep both colonies healthy and strong."
   "Well, you're the expert," Sasha chortled. "Can we build those boxes ourselves? Leia is very handy with a hammer and nails, she built our rabbit hutches and equipment shelters and all, and I found some very comprehensive plans online when I started looking into it."
   "You can certainly do that, it's very rewarding to build your own hive boxes, not to mention cheaper," Jasper nodded with another chuckle. "But you gotta keep to the dimensions very strictly, and some things you can't build yourself, you'll have to buy them, such as the frames for the brood chamber and the supers. And because you have to buy those, that's why you have to stick to the dimensions so strictly, to make sure the frames actually fit."
   "Yeah, that's what I was thinking," Sasha nodded, sipping her tea again. "Those plans I found mentioned something about that. Don't those frames have like wires and wax or something?"
   "Yes, it's basically a square of wood slats with metal wire mesh in it, and a layer of wax on both sides," Jasper nodded. "That's to give the bees a foundation to start building their own honeycomb on."
   "Makes sense," Sasha said with a light shrug. "I suppose it'd be better to buy pre-built boxes in that case, so we can be sure everything fits together." She grinned over the rim of her teacup as she sipped her tea again. "You wouldn't happen to have any available for a nice price, Jasper, would you?"
   "Matter of fact, I do," Jasper chuckled. "I always keep a number of kits available in case I need to set up any extra. And they're very suitable for beginners as well, they're based on Langstroth hives, super common, everybody uses those pretty much. Nice thing about them is that they're modular, so you can stack as many supers on them as you want." He gave his head a light shake and chuckled again. "Not recommended though, they can get top-heavy and topple over, so it'd be better to keep it to one or two supers and just set up a second box when your colony outgrows its box."
   "That also makes sense," Sasha nodded with a chortle. "Well, I'll be needing one of those boxes, then. Those kits you mentioned, they have all the necessary bits and pieces?"
   "Yep. Actually, check this out." Standing up, Jasper walked over to a tall cabinet and took out several things which he set on the desk. "I've given a presentation on beekeeping at the school once or twice, so I have all these visual aids. This here is a miniature Langstroth hive box, exactly the same as a regular-sized one." He took a small wooden box consisting of a number of loose pieces and took it apart to show Sasha. "This is the base, the foundation of the box; the hive stand. I prefer making them with a slanted landing board, easier for the bees to land on. This keeps the hive off the ground, so you can set this part directly on the ground, but it's even better to elevate it. You can set it on a built-to-fit bench or table, for instance, which has the advantage that you can set the legs of the table in dishes of water to keep ants out, and you don't have to bend over as much to remove the supers."
   "That sounds great, especially since both Leia and I are so darn tall," Sasha chortled. "And we often have soup for lunch, so we have plenty of empty cans to set the legs of a table in. Do you also have those tables?"
   "Yes, I have some elevated stands, but you might want to build your own," Jasper nodded with a chuckle. "The elevated stands I use are not all too high, because I'm so short myself; you might want to have a higher one."
   "We probably do, yes," Sasha chortled again. "But we can easily build that ourselves. The top of that table, should that be the exact size as that base, or should it be larger?"
   "It can be a bit wider for stability, but I would recommend letting the front of the hive stand, this part here with the slanted landing board, overhang a bit," Jasper pointed out, taking a small frame with a flat board that had a large hole covered with screen and a loose slat with a hole cut in it. "Then the next part is this; your bottom board. That's what the first super, the brood chamber, sits on. I always make them with a screen for extra ventilation. And this is the entrance reducer; it's basically the front door to the hive. Bees go in and out through the hole, but vermin can't get in. Oftentimes, they have two openings; a large one for summer and a small one for winter, but in the climate here, you can get away with just having the summer opening." He took off the first box section and turned it over. "This is the heart of your hive, the deep super which serves as the brood chamber. Just an open box with no top or bottom, but as you can see, there's this slatted rack in the bottom, again for added ventilation, easier access, and so the bees don't make any excess ladder comb. That's optional, but I always include it. This is where the deep frames go in for the bees to build their comb, and those are the ones you leave alone, because it's where all the eggs and baby bees go, and all the honey in the combs they build on these frames is for the colony to eat, thrive and survive. A deep super can hold eight to twelve frames; the ones I build hold ten." He carefully picked several tiny frames with a screen in them out of the small box. "There's just five in this miniature, but it's just for illustration to show that they go in vertically and slot in from the top, and what they look like. The real ones have fine metal mesh with a thin layer of wax on both sides."
   "So you don't harvest all of the honey from a box then," Sasha remarked.
   "Oh heck no, you gotta leave plenty for the bees to live on," Jasper nodded. "Harvesting all the honey would be the same as me coming to your farm and picking up all of your crops, [i]and[/i] all the food in your kitchen, fridge and pantry, leaving nothing for you to eat. And you gotta eat well to keep producing more crops, right? Same with bees, they gotta have a steady supply of the food they make for themselves so they can keep going out to pollinate more flowers and collect more nectar."
   "That makes all the sense," Sasha nodded with a light laugh. "So then, that first box is the living room, bedrooms and kitchen, and you don't touch it, gotcha."
   "Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it," Jasper chuckled. He took out another little flat rack that held a board with rows of small holes drilled in it. "Next, you have your queen excluder. This goes on top of the brood box, to prevent the queen from climbing up into the pantry and lay a bunch of eggs in all the extra honey up there. These holes are just big enough for the worker bees, but too small for the queen to fit through, so she has to stay down in the brood chamber. Then here are the honey supers, basically the pantries of the hive." He took two shallower little boxes from the miniature and turned them over to pick out a few of the small frames with a screen in them. "You can use deep or shallow ones, and stack a bunch of these on top of each other, but I'd advice going for no more than three to prevent the hive from becoming top-heavy. Frames slot in vertically from the top, same as in the brood chamber, and again, there can be eight to twelve of them, but in the ones I build there's ten. And I usually have two shallow supers with a deep one in between. [i]These[/i] are the ones you harvest."
   "Right," Sasha nodded with another short laugh. "So you only raid the pantry, so to speak."
   "Exactly," Jasper nodded with a chuckle. "The honey in the brood chamber, that's the hive's daily bread; the daily breakfast, lunch and dinner for all the bees. The honey in these supers is their stockpile, all the extra honey they don't specifically need in a day and stash away for when times get meager. That's the surplus you can safely harvest without endangering the health of your colony. And finally..." He took the last two flat little frames, one holding a board with an oval hole in it and one covered in aluminium foil. "These are the lids. An inner cover that fits within the top super, with an entrance hole for the bees. Basically the backdoor, you could say. And the outer cover, which can be metal-clad or fully metal, and that's pretty much the roof, to keep the weather out."
   "That's more straightforward than I thought it would be," Sasha nodded with a smile. "It's kind of like a stackable Lego set. And I can get these boxes from you?"
   "Yes, as I said, I always have several kits in stock," Jasper nodded, putting the miniature bee box back together. "They all assemble into a life-size version of this one, and they come with three honey supers, two shallow ones and a deep one in between those, complete with frames and everything. You can add more honey supers, but as I said a couple times before; [i]I[/i] wouldn't do that. Three is plenty for a good healthy colony, and besides, you want to keep things easy for yourself as well. At harvest time, you gotta carry the supers to your extraction room, and those deep ones easily get up to over sixty pounds when they're full."
   "That's quite an amount," Sasha smiled, sipping the last of her tea. "And I'll gladly stick with the recommendations from the expert." She set down her teacup. "Right, so, I have one of these boxes, let's say I have bees in them as well, and they've made enough honey to harvest; now what do I need?" She chortled softly. "I may need to mention that Leia and I do all our farming work in the buff, too."
   "Right, well, you'll definitely need a beekeeper outfit," Jasper chuckled. "No matter how calm and rehearsed you are, bees [i]will[/i] sting when you start messing with the hive, and it hurts, whether you have fur or not. So you will at the very least need a pair of gloves and a wide hat with an all-around veil, and if you usually go unclothed, you'll need a full-body suit as well. But that's relatively easy; you can get these disposable painter suits, they're cheap enough, and they cover you from the feet up, including your feet and a hood over your head, and they're made from light and breathable material so you won't get braised into a pot roast while wearing one in summer. I use them too, and because I don't paint, I can actually reuse them as well. They come in sets of ten, and I use only one a year for three harvests, so one set will last you ten years easily."
   "Haha! Well, that's good to know," Sasha chortled. "Do I need to smoke a pipe, too?"
Jasper chuckled again and pulled out a pipe and a tobacco pouch, beginning to calmly stuff the pipe.
   "That's not strictly necessary. I smoke pipe because I enjoy it, but it actually won't do you too much good when you start pulling supers from your hive. You'll need a smoke puffer that burns incense cones or oiled woodchips, so you can direct the smoke."
   "Oiled? Isn't that bad for the bees?" Sasha asked, running her fingers over her nose.
   "Not if you use the proper beekeeper-specific materials," Jasper smiled, puffing his pipe alight. "For beekeeping, you can get incense cones that give off woodsmoke, or woodchips coated in natural oils so they give off plenty of smoke. Contrary to what most people think, but the smoke is not what intoxicates the bees and makes them docile, you know. You puff a bit of smoke into the hive and wait a bit, and the bees think, "oh shit, fire!" so they all move down into the brood chamber and start absolutely [i]stuffing[/i] themselves silly on the honey in there. That's what makes them sluggish and docile. I mean, think about it; if you eat way too much of a delicious meal, all you wanna do afterwards is take a nap, right?"
   "Right!" Sasha chortled, lighting a cigarette. "Okay, that's good to know as well. So now I have a smoker, what else do I need?"
   "At the very least, you'll need a bee brush and a hive tool," Jasper smiled while slowly puffing on his pipe and pulling near a few more items. "A bee brush is a long and narrow brush with long and soft bristles, like this one, and this is a hive tool; basically a short, flat pry bar that you use to lift up the top covers and lift the frames from the supers so you can grab them and pull them out. Usually, the smoke will have evacuated all the bees from the frames in the honey supers, but if there's still a few left, you use the brush to gently brush them off the frames. When all the frames are clear of bees, you can bring the supers into your extraction room and start getting at the honey."
   "So I'll also need a special room," Sasha chortled.
   "For convenience, yes," Jasper nodded with a chuckle. "And to keep things clean, of course. I mean, you can do your harvest out in the open, but all the bees will still be there, and tons of other insects who will be happy to drown in your vat of harvested honey."
   "Ah, yeah, I don't think I'd need any additional protein in my honey," Sasha sniggered. "But well, we have an underground bunker under our windmill with a cool-room where I process the milk from our goat, so I could use that."
   "That'll be perfect, yes," Jasper nodded again. "A nice clean environment, with plenty of space to set down and handle all the heavy stuff. The best way to go about it is to have an extra box you can close off. Set it by your hive, and whenever you've brushed a frame clean of any bees that are still on there, and possibly even baby bees, because they can still get in there even with a queen excluder so you should always check carefully, you can put the cleaned frame in the extra box and close it while you work on the next frame so they'll [i]stay[/i] clean. And very importantly; do it in the morning! Most of your bees will be out working then, so it's much safer. If you do it in the evening, pretty much all the bees will be back in the hive."
   "Right, well, we have a morning routine; after our breakfast and bath, we feed our animals, collect eggs and milk our goat, it should be easy enough to add collecting hive frames to that," Sasha smiled.
   "That's good, yes, and you only have to do it two or three times a year, depending on the size and productivity of your colony," Jasper nodded. "I usually harvest early June, mid-July and near the end of September. But you do want to set aside the whole day for it, so you can do the whole process in one go, from harvesting to bottling."
Sasha nodded and actually started taking a lot of notes.
   "That's good to know, and I figured it would be best to finish the whole procedure. Right, so, now I have my cleaned frames full of honey, ready to bring to our cool-room. What else do I need? And even more importantly; how do I even know the frames actually [i]are[/i] full of harvestable honey?"
Jasper pulled near a piece of synthetic honeycomb with several of the hexagons covered with something white and showed it to Sasha.
   "Cap count," he explained. "See, bees don't collect honey, they collect nectar from which they [i]make[/i] honey by reducing the moisture content of the nectar. When it has turned into, let's call it ripe, honey, they cap it off with a little wax cap; that's these white things you'll see all over the comb. You'll want a cap count of eighty percent, roughly. So when you lift a frame and you see only three-quarters or less of it covered in wax caps, put it back, it's not done yet. Although sometimes, especially near the end of the season, bees may not always cap off the honey, so if you want to be sure, you can get a honey refractometer so you can test the honey in any uncapped cells. You're looking for a moisture content of eighteen and a half percent or less; anything above that means the honey is not yet ripe."
   "That sounds involved," Sasha remarked.
   "It is," Jasper confirmed. "But it's also optional, you don't [i]have[/i] to do it. And frankly, in this climate, there's hardly a thing to worry about. Do your first harvest on a nice sunny morning in the first week of June, on a nice sunny morning in the second or third week of July, and your final harvest on a nice sunny morning in the third week of September, and I can almost guarantee you'll have fully capped frames each time."
   "Okay, good, that's some reassurance," Sasha nodded, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray. "So now I have frames with fully capped combs, I have them in my cool-room away from the bees and any other insects; now how do I get the honey out?"
   "That's where your other tools come into play," Jasper smiled. "You'll need a capping knife or scraper." He pulled near a wide, flat knife with an electric cord on it. "This is my capping knife, it's electrically heated to slice through the wax caps easier and faster, but it's luxury; you don't need a heated knife, I just use one because I have so many hives to process so anything that makes it go faster and easier is a bonus. You'll also need some empty buckets; stainless steel ones are the best, and I'd also advice to have some kind of slat or bar you can clip over the top of one of those buckets so you can rest the frames on it, because they can get pretty heavy. Now, you can use the age-old crush and strain method to get the honey out, but that is messy, labor-intensive and it takes [i]days[/i] because you have to put all the mashed-up comb into a cheesecloth bag and hang it over a bucket to let all the honey drip out. Plus, if you do it that way, your bees will have to rebuild all the comb first and that also takes a bunch of time, so you may only get one or two harvests a year that way. I prefer using a centrifugal honey extractor, and the one I use is a big one for lots of frames and it has an electric motor, but you can easily get by with a smaller hand-cranked one. The advantage of that is that it's much cleaner, even with a hand-cranked one it's much quicker, and all the comb remains intact so your bees can get right back to work putting new honey in once you put the frames back in the super."
   "That does sound like a much more preferable method," Sasha agreed. "But it also sounds like I need much more equipment than I thought."
   "Yes, even for small-scale home-production of honey, there's just a number of things you absolutely need to have," Jasper nodded, letting go a light chuckle as he tapped his pipe on the edge of the ashtray. "But if it's any consolation; I have all that stuff available here, down to slats to clip over a bucket, so I can provide you with everything you need."
   "That's actually handy, I'll probably take you up on that," Sasha chortled. "So, anyway, I have my buckets, I have a slat, I have the knife. Now what?"
   "Right," Jasper nodded while cleaning his pipe. "Rest a capped frame on the slat over the bucket and scrape off the wax caps. First one side, then the other. Some honey will drip out, but most of it will stay in the cells. When you've done both sides, place the frame in your extractor, and make sure you already have a clean bucket sitting under the spout of it because more honey will drip from the frame and out of the extractor while you work on uncapping the other frames. When all slots in your extractor are filled - I suggest using one with space for ten frames, so you can do one full super at a time - you close the lid and secure it, and you start spinning. But slowly! It doesn't take much, and you don't want to sling honey all over the place, because as you know that stuff is sticky as heck. If you use a hand-cranked extractor, you'll be able to feel the weight of the full frames, and that it gets lighter and lighter, and then you can start cranking a little quicker to get the last honey out. Once no more honey drips from the extractor, you're done and you can uncap and insert the next batch of frames. For one of the hives I use, you'll do it three times in total."
   "And then I'm left with a box full of frames with empty honeycomb, and two buckets, one with honey and one with those wax thingies and some honey, I take it," Sasha smiled.
   "Exactly," Jasper nodded again. "You can strain that second bucket; just secure some cheesecloth over your bucket of extracted honey and empty the bucket with wax cappings onto it and let it sit for the rest of the day to let the honey drip down. You can discard of the wax cappings, but why would you wanna do that if you can make beeswax candles from it?"
   "Maybe because I have no clue how to make candles?" Sasha chortled.
   "Haha! Good point," Jasper chuckled. "But you can also store it in a plastic container with an airtight lid and bring it here next time you're in town. Kimberly will be happy to take it off your hands and give you an amount of candles equivalent to the amount of wax you brought in return. And that way, you won't have to render the wax to clean it either, Kimberly will do that."
   "I like that idea, I'm not much for wasting anything if I can help it," Sasha nodded with a smile. "But what do I do with the bucketful of honey? I should pour that into jars, right?"
   "Yes, but not right away," Jasper nodded. "You should let it sit for at least a day, maybe two, to let all the air escape. You don't want any air in your honey; it has a pretty much indefinite shelf life, but if there's air in it, it can go bad. Now, if you use that method of straining the chunk of wax cappings and honey, that's already a good day the honey will be sitting, so I'd advice to do that and leave it overnight, with cheesecloth and all still in place. Then the next day, you can bottle it, and I'd use glass jars. They may be a bit pricier, but they're by far the best option."
   "That's no problem, we already use a bunch of glass jars for our jam," Sasha smiled. "Granted, that's with cloth tops, but I've also already been looking at glass jars with metal lids for when I start making elderberry syrup." She let go a short laugh. "For which, incidentally, I need honey; that's what started this whole thing, really."
   "Well, that's a good thing," Jasper smiled. "Quart jars are a very good option, and I know you're using those because I've gotten some of your jam before. So get more, with metal lids, pour in the honey, and I'd suggest using a wide and shallow funnel or a gated bucket because again, if you spill any, that's one heck of a sticky mess you'll have on your hands. Leave a bit of headspace in the jar, put on the lid, store in a cool and dry place, and of course, it's always a good idea to label the jars with the date you extracted the honey. Plus, if you're going to sell the surplus, you may want to design a prettier label that says honey or wildflower honey and the name of your farm or something. Similar to what you do with your jars of jam, actually."
   "Yeah, that's what I figured," Sasha nodded with a smile. "Do you think we'd have much of a surplus to sell?"
   "Not the first year," Jasper smiled. "You won't even get any honey for yourself the first year, because the colony must first establish itself. Only start harvesting the second year. But once you start harvesting from the second year on, you can get between forty and eighty pounds of honey from one hive, even up to a hundred pounds in very good years." He let go a chuckle. "And truthfully, with the climate in this country, and especially in this valley with all the wide open space and abundance of wildflowers all over the place, every year is a very good year, so I wouldn't be surprised if you'd get close to a hundred pounds per year from your hive. Heck, if you set up a second box and alternate between harvesting them, you'll get even more because one hive will have time to build up extra surplus while you harvest the other."
   "Wow, that's actually a lot more than I expected," Sasha said, running a hand over her nose and mouth. "And that would make for a lot of surplus to sell, because I seriously doubt Leia and I would go through more than three or four pounds of honey a year at most, even if we use it on a lot of things and I also use it for the syrup."
   "Bees are very industrious," Jasper nodded with a smile. "There's a good reason the saying is "busy as a bee", and if you give them the time and opportunity to be as industrious as they can be, they'll reward you plentifully."
   "No kidding," Sasha chortled. "Oh, but what about bumblebees? Leia mentioned bumblebees."
Jasper shrugged lightly.
   "You don't keep bumblebees for honey. They hardly produce any, and they also tend to nest on the ground, although I do have a few small bumblebee boxes that have proved successful in the past. But really, bumblebees are no good for honey. They're excellent pollinators though, especially for herbs and things like tomatoes, so that would be a good enough reason to provide a place for them."
   "Hmmm, okay," Sasha nodded slowly, running a hand over her nose and mouth again. "I'll take at least one of those boxes. Leia really likes bumblebees, and if I can make her happy with a bumblebee box, that's all the reason I need." With a smile, she sat back in her chair and made a gesture with her hand. "Well, walk me through all the necessities again, Jasper, everything I need as a newly starting beekeeper, and tell me when I can start."
Jasper chuckled and sat back in his chair as well.
   "Alright. You'll need at least one hive box, and preferably two. Full-body beekeeper outfit, smoke puffer and bee-friendly fuel, hive tool, bee brush, capping knife, stainless steel five-gallon buckets, at least two but more is always handy, a bar to clip over one of the buckets, a sizeable piece of cheesecloth, preferably stretched around a metal ring so you can securely place it over a bucket, a large wood or plastic box with a lid to transport brushed-off frames, an electric or hand-cranked honey extractor, plenty of glass jars with metal lids, a bee and insect-free room to process the frames, a label maker or printer, lots and lots of wildflowers and flowering plants all around you, a decent amount of time on your hands for a few days per year, and plenty of patience for the first year. And of course, you'll need actual bees. There's these starter packages you can get, they contain a fertile queen and about three pounds of worker bees, and I can actually provide those as well, plus all the other stuff save for the processing room, the open space with flowers and the time and patience. You can buy everything you need right now if you want to, but you'll only get the bees late March, early April so they can comfortably establish a colony when spring first starts springing."
   "Aww damn, you don't sell any patience?" Sasha sniggered. "That sucks, it sounds like I'll need a decent amount extra of that if we can only get our first bees on the farm by next March."
   "Yeah, sorry, patience is very tricky to come by, so I hardly have any extra in stock," Jasper chuckled. "I still can sell you all the rest if you want though, but keep it stored for the time being. It's a good thing to set up a hive box before you get any bees, but only do it about a week beforehand so it won't sit empty for a long time and no wild critters will decide to move in. So let's say you come here April second to get your starter set of bees from me, then set up your first box no later than the twenty-sixth of March."
   "Alright, well, in any way I'll get all the stuff now, it'll be good to have it and it will allow me to organize my cool-room so I'll have the proper space for when our first honey is ready," Sasha smiled, making a note and letting go a quick chortle. "Although I'll only take the gloves and veiled hat of the outfit, I don't think the paint suits you use would fit me very well so I'll get a set of those online or something."
   "Haha, yeah, unfortunately they're not one size fits all," Jasper nodded with another chuckle. "But I'll be glad to sell you everything else you need, and I'll even make you a good deal. I have an older hand-cranked extractor I don't use anymore, so I'll throw that one in for free. I'd rather see it going to a good home where it will be used rather than having it sit here gathering dust and cobwebs."
   "I appreciate that a lot, Jasper, thank you," Sasha smiled, getting up. "Well then, if you go get all the stuff together, I'll go get my car and park it right out front here so we can hinder traffic while we load everything."

They both laughed shortly and walked out of the office. It only took a few moments for Sasha to walk down the dirt street to the parking spaces between the garage and the hardware store to get into her old Citroen delivery vehicle and drive it back over to the crafts store. By the time she got there, Jasper appeared from around the side of the side building in a small skidsteer with pallet forks which carried a pallet holding several wood boxes and boards and frames, a couple of boxes and an old stainless steel canister on wheels with a large handle, a crank handle and a small spout at the bottom. With both rear doors of the Citroen delivery vehicle opened wide, he even managed to just slide the whole pallet into the back of the cargo compartment.

Walking back into the crafts store, the Caspian tiger man handed Sasha a list with everything on it that was on the pallet and ensured her it was all she needed to start a successful bee colony from scratch - once March came around and she would be able to also get the first actual bees. Sasha smiled as she checked the list and was actually pleasantly surprised at the total price of the whole collection; less than $700. She thanked Jasper and shook his paw, telling him he should drop by the farm sometime to see the area she was aiming to set up the bee boxes for himself.

As the time was nearing four o'clock in the afternoon, Sasha didn't hang around for too much longer; it still was quite a drive back to the farm after all. Getting into her old Citroen and setting off, the freckled human woman took her phone and called Buddleia to say she was on her way back and would arrive back at the farm around eight o'clock, to which Buddleia promised she would wait with supper until Sasha was home again.

All the way back to the farm, Sasha was smiling to herself. This was exciting! It might take a bit of patience for a few months, but soon Butterfly Farm would be buzzing with activity quite literally!