Meet the Rams: Mr. Bumblebee & Lucas

In the summer, before the rams are introduced to their girls, we plan what ewes will go with which ram. Many years we just put ewes into color groups with one ram. This year the plan was different. However, fate played its part and changed our plans.

Prepping  Lucas at Black Sheep Gathering

 Meet Lucas he is a yearling ram, this being his first year breeding any ewes. Lucas is our farm's breeding and was purchased this spring by a friend who we do a lot of ram sharing and trading with. He was assigned to breed the majority of my flock in addition to our friends natural colored Romney flock. This however left Lucas' mom and half sister in a bad spot. We really didn't want to put them on Lucas because is was too close. They also were too nice to put on our white ram Chance and loose a year on our two best natural colored ewes.

So, meet Mr. Bumblebee. He is our friends ram and we used him last year on three ewes as an experiment. We had hoped his lambs might be bigger, he ended up producing mostly boys and the lambs weren't any bigger. The story behind his name is that the one ewe lamb he did sire we sold to a 4-H family in California, they named the lamb Bumblebee aka BB. Though the lambs he produced weren't a big improvement, he was in no way related to the two ewes that were too closely related to Lucas.

Checking out the girls

This was the original set up of our breeding year. That is, until fate took a twist. Two Wednesdays ago we got a text from our friend saying Lucas was hurt and asking if we could bring Mr. Bumblebee over. So we loaded up Mr. Bumblebee and his ewes and headed over. It ended up that Lucas had hurt his hock and could hardly walk, let alone breed a flock of ewes. Before his accident Lucas had only managed to successfully breed three ewes, only one was ours. So, now Mr. Bumblebee has taken over the majority of the breeding. Meanwhile, Lucas is slowly healing.

Zora playing peek-a-boo.

I made friends with one of our friend's ewes, Fudge.