Hope you all like goats… a lot! Sarah and I went to goat yoga at Garfield Park Conservatory today. They’ve been doing goat yoga on some Saturdays all summer, with Natalie, the no-goat Saturday yoga instructor, also teaching this class. She said that at the beginning of the summer when the goats were very young all they wanted to do was nap on people’s yoga mats, but now they are quite energetic and there was no sign of napping. It was really delightful.
The class was held outside on the grounds just southwest of the conservatory building. As you can see, the setup for goat yoga is pretty simple – just an enclosed grassy space, goats, hay and leaves for them to eat, and people with their yoga mats.
I particularly like these chocolate-brown goats with white lines on their faces.
During class the goats would jump up on people’s backs! They are very playful. And it doesn’t hurt to have a goat onto your back, they are very light-footed.
After goat yoga, we walked around the gardens and admired the water lily pond that just keeps getting better.
And had a look at the central lawn area that has been planted with cabbage. Quite a lot of cabbage!
We also heard that today is National Honey Bee Day. The beekeepers had a demonstration going in another corner of the grounds that was really interesting. Bee colony collapse has been in the news a lot because it is a condition that is happening to bees causing their populations to die off in great numbers, very suddenly. There’s a mite that seems to be a big culprit, and today the beekeepers did a test to see how infested this colony is. They open up one hive and scoop up a couple hundred bees into a mason jar and place netting over the top.
Meanwhile, we got to see this frame covered in bees up close.
Back to the test. They spooned in a couple of scoops of powdered sugar and shook the jar, coating the bees with powdered sugar and making them very angry. They started flying around in the jar, trying to get the sugar off their wings. After a minute or so of shaking, they shake the jar upside down over a bowl, causing the powdered sugar, and here’s the genius part, with it any mites, to fall out into the bowl. They then spray water in the bowl, melting the sugar, and they check for mites.
Good news for this colony, no mites! They repeat this test about every 2 weeks. We also got to taste the honey harvested there over the last several summers. Lots of different delicious flavors!
That was a lot of goat pics… it sounds very like “mum and baby yoga” which seems to work well until babies get moving! Great pic of the goat on your backs! And good news for the bees 🙂
That looks like great fun doing yoga with goats! Great photos! I didn’t know about the mites that are troubling the bee colonies. Interesting about the powdered sugar used in the test. Now we know what makes bees really angry, something you don’t want to try at home.
Fun! And your mats had more grass and sticks on them than normal. (: Looks like the goats had fun too!