Friday, August 8

Friday was our trip day. In the morning we went across the street to Seven Stars Yogurt farm. We saw their cows and how they process the milk. We also got to see a new baby calf that was just born that morning, named Indy. They make the yogurt in a big silver barrel that processes milk inside of it. Instead of milking the cows by hands, they use a milking machine - an automatic milking udder! Seven Stars has to label their product exactly because there are inspectors that come to see whether they're following rules, like how big the symbol that says "organic" can be. They told us that their costs for making the yogurt were going up because gas is more expensive; we saw a barrel of organic maple syrup that cost $2800! At the end of our visit, we got to sample: vanilla, original, and maple. Megan liked vanilla and maple - she mixed them together with leftover peach jam we had made.

After the yogurt farm, we visited Hives for Lives. We saw six or seven of their beehives. You can stand to the side of the beehive, but not in front of it, because the worker bees don't know where they're going when they come out of the hive and could sting you. A couple of worker bees sometimes goes behind the queen bee's back and crowns another queen bee. The two queen bees battle to the death to see which will be the queen. After that, we got to label the honey, pour it into jars, and took wax off the honeycomb to let the honey come out. Hives for Lives is a nonprofit organization; they're raising money for cancer charities. It's just two girls who started this business after their grandfather died, and they wanted to help people who had cancer like their grandfather did. Plus, Molly and Carly are only 16 and 14, and it's really cool how two girls can do so much in only a few years. They raised a lot of money. After we helped with the honey, we went swimming. We had fun. We went home.

Written by Megan