|
|
Cabin Creek Horse Farm Welcomes New Bedford Academy
Students will spend the day at Cabin Creek Horse Farm learning about horses, bee keeping
and livestock.
Horse Facts:
A horse is considered adult at age four.
A female horse over 4 years old is called a mare.
A male horse over 4 years old is called a stallion.
Horses are measured in hands.
A hand is four inches.
A horse is generally over 14.2 hh (hands high).
Anything under 14.2 hh is a pony.
There are over 200 breeds of horses in the world.
A horse's gestation period (time between breeding and birth) is about
11 months, but can be anywhere from 10-12 months.
Horses usually live to be 20-25 years old. The oldest horse lived to be
62.
A father horse is called a sire.
A mother horse is called a dam.
The scientific name for the horse is equus caballus. Horses like classical music.
The oldest horse was named Old Billy. He
was a cross breed, he was born in 1760 and he lived to be 62.
The World's Largest Horse was a purebred
Belgian stallion named Brooklyn Supreme. He stood 19.2 hands (6'6") at
his withers. He weighed over 3,200 pounds and is entered in the Guiness
Book of World Records. He was foaled in 1928 and died in 1948. He lived
in Iowa.
Cabin Creek Horses are trained in Dressage.
Dressage is occasionally referred to as "Horse Ballet." Dressage is a path and destination of competitive horse training.
Its fundamental
purpose is to develop, through standardized progressive training
methods, a horse's natural athletic ability and willingness to perform,
thereby maximizing its potential as a riding horse. At the peak of a
dressage horse's gymnastic development, it can smoothly respond to a
skilled rider's minimal aids by performing the requested movement while
remaining relaxed and appearing effortless. Dressage was first recognized as an
important equestrian pursuit in the West during the Renaissance. The
great European riding masters of that period developed a sequential
training system that has changed little since then. Classical dressage
is still considered the basis of modern dressage.
Honey Bee Facts:
Unique among all creatures, only the honeybee improves the environment and preys not on any other species.
The honey bee has been around for millions of years.
It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it's the only food that contains "pinocembrin", an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.
Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell
is so precise that it can differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carries pollen or nectar from meters away.
The honey bee's wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.
The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.
A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
The bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.
A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.
The queen bee can live up to 5 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day.
Larger than the worker bees, the male honey bees (also called drones), have no stinger and do no work at all. All they do is mating.
Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but they don’t leave the hive to help defend it.
Honey bees communicate with one another by "dancing".
During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
About Our Log Cabin:
Pioneers who ventured into this part of the
untamed Michigan Territory in the 1830’s were a hardy group of
optimists. With strong backs and a broad ax they cleared the timber and
built their cabins in the wilderness that would become Bedford Township.
One of the few remaining pioneer log cabins in all of Bedford Township
is a sturdy structure located on a sandy spot at 10488 Secor Road. It
was built on 160 acres of land purchased for $282.56 by Daniel
Greenvault in 1836. The William Powlesland family came to this area from
England and settled into the cabin about 1844 on the Greenvault/Chittenden
farm. The Powlesland men worked as farm hands on this, the largest dairy
farm in Monroe County. It had the biggest dairy barn in all of Michigan,
and that building would later be destroyed in a tornado, which
thankfully bypassed the cabin. Other owners of this land in the late
1870’s were L. Clarke and B. Ellis Bullock, however, locals still refer
to it as the Chittenden farm.
In the early 1900’s, Asa and Mary Osborn would occupy the cabin. Asa was
in ill health, so son Henry, his wife Ellen and children Melvin, Edith,
and Bessie all moved in with them. Henry, Jr., was born in April of
1910, filling the little cabin to overflowing.
Current
owners, Dean and Janine Vollmar, are painstakingly restoring this
historic cabin. It is a slow process, but a labor of love, as they work
to preserve this nearly 200 year-old cabin for future generations.
by Trudy Urbani,
Bedford Township Historian
|
News & Events
Horses at CCF
NBA Field Trip
Barn Project
Maumee Valley
Country Day
Guin Turns 30
Quick Links
Stonehaven Farms
Rainbow Ridge
Your Horse's Health
Equine Healthcare
Games and Fun
To-do List
Horse Show Schedule |
