Apple Acres Farm

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United States
Houghton, MI
Apple Acres Farm

We offer farm stays, tours, classes, and seasonal farm products.

Apple Acres Farm is an off-grid, small-scale farm inspired by regenerative permaculture design principles and the desire to create a sustainable, resilient, and local lifestyle.

05/31/2026

Busy bees 🌸🐝

04/23/2026

Queen bees and nucs 🐝

Seeing a queen bee is always special. It's not only because it can be tricky to find one bee in the midst of tens of thousands of bees. It's because she makes a hive viable. Without a queen, you just have a box of bees.

Buckfast bees are known for swarming and we had a very strong hive coming off of a long winter. With today's summer-like weather, I was able to make a split (nuc) by removing three frames of capped brood (inner frames) and two frames of honey and pollen (outer frames).

There are many benefits to making a split in the spring:

🐝 Provides a brood break while they raises a new queen, which reduces the varroa mite population.

🐝 Simulates swarming by removing the queen as well as a portion of the bees and honey from the hive.

🐝 Improves the hive's chance of surviving the winter (by raising a young queen)

🐝 Allows the bees to select their own queen

In 7-10 days I'll check back to make sure the hive is raising several queens 🤞

04/18/2026

Warrior Archie 🐓

We were able to rehome our two barn roosters last week, but one hour before their departure, Archie and one of the roosters had a bit of a tussle.

Four roosters running around was too much, especially when the younger two wanted to say hi to the ladies in the coop. Archie was having none of it.

Thankfully they were both young and didn't have pointy spurs, so everyone walked away fine, if not a little beat up in the face, comb and/or waddles (Archie refused to let me take a photo of his other side, which is the worse of the two).

We'll miss the barn roosters (they were sweet little dudes), but it's nice not to constantly have eye out for potential rooster drama.

04/17/2026

First hive inspection of the year thanks to today's summer-like weather ☀️

I had already opened up the hive to remove the moisture and briefly check on their food supply. Both hives had over 100 lbs of honey going into the winter and I was happy to see they still had plenty to get them through the spring.

Thousands of bees die during the winter, which tend to pile up in between frames of the bottom boxes as well as on the bottom board. This contributes to high moisture conditions (leading to mold) and can block the front entrance.

Today I removed the bottom 2-3 boxes that were mostly empty of bees and honey, shifted the top boxes to the bottom and added an empty box to the top.

Bees like to move up, so swapping full boxes to the bottom and adding an empty box above will help prevent a swarm. Buckfast bees are known to swarm, so I'll be making a couple of nucs with the overwintered queens to encourage both hives to raise new queens.

I left the frames with mold out in the sun to disinfect (after removing the dead bees). The bees will clean these frames up, but this makes their job easier.

04/16/2026

Enjoying a lazy spring day in the sun 🐐

What you can't see in this photo are all the honey bees checking out the coffee grounds right next to the goats 🐝

The goats normally lounge on their benches but today they decided they wanted to hang out with their bee friends.

☀️

03/26/2026

KenDrake and his ladies (Quacklemore, Neva and Aela) are ready for spring ☀️

These lively ducks have been enjoying their winter stay in the barn, but we're looking forward to losing more snow so they can move back into their duck house (mostly so we can stop hauling buckets of water down to the barn).

We weren't sure what to expect when we added ducks to the farm last year; however, they have not disappointed! They are such characters that you can't help but smile at their antics.

Our duck goals for 2026 are simple:
1) get them to hang out near the gardens to eat slugs (the whole reason we got ducks)
2) get them to use the pond we built last year (once the younger ducks joined the older ones they stopped visiting the pond)

If you're curious about what's on KenDrake's foot in the last photo, he's wearing a neoprene bo**ie. We are treating his bumblefoot (a foot infection common in poultry) so he'll be rocking this footwear until we get that healed. Nobody enjoyed the process of putting his bo**ie on...

03/19/2026

Today's goat hiking/sap checking adventure 💧🐐

The goats love finding snacks along the driveway and near the sugar shack, but can't be trusted when it comes to collecting the sap (they discovered sap tastes good and like to chew on the tubing 🙄).

This afternoon we were mainly checking on our collection jugs after the windy weather earlier in the week (which luckily for us was not the blizzard that had been forecasted).

Jasper is particularly fond of hemlock and turns his nose up at every other forest snack, which is good because he's now our biggest goat and likes to nose the other two away.

We've had one boil so far this season and are happy for the return of warmer weather that will get the sap flowing again 🍁

02/21/2026

Ever wonder what 250" of snow looks like? ❄️

We've had a couple of melts but the snow situation around the chicken coop and barn is getting serious!

The poor ducks are afraid to hang out under the overhang after a big slab of snow let loose from the roof.

The chickens were missing the extra light the windows usually let in so I did shovel the snow away from the windows after taking these photos.

Last but not least, the goats miss the snowshoe paths that had hardened enough for them to join me in the apple orchard while I pruned trees. They don't mind the snow but don't love unknowingly stepping off the trail and sinking several feet into deep snow.

Hard to imagine where the next potential four feet of snow will go before winter is done (we average around 300" of snow a year) 🫣

02/20/2026

It may not feel like spring, but our chickens and ducks certainly think it is 🥚

Before we had poultry, I never fully appreciated the saying about being a 'spring chicken' but they sure do crank out eggs this time of year!

The lighter eggs are from the ducks (bottom egg = mature duck, top egg = young duck who just started laying). The darker eggs are from our chickens (left egg = mature hen, right egg = pullet hen). Young poultry lay smaller eggs at first while their bodies adjust.

02/16/2026

Rooster snuggles are the best 🐓

This dude (and his equally handsome) brother are looking for a flock of their own! Message if interested!!

Address

Houghton, MI
49931

Opening Hours

4pm - 6pm

Website

http://www.appleacres.farm/hello

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