Let’s start off with an update on my bees. I gathered my first honey harvest yesterday and it was very exciting! I wasn’t sure if I’d get any honey this year as my hive was a little behind the pack compared to the other hives in my beekeeping workshop. If there was a honey gathering competition, I was certainly on the losing team. Don’t blame it all on the bees, they had their reasons.
When I first got my nuc (nucleus colony) of bees at our second workshop, I dutifully brought them home and transplanted them in their new hive. I checked on them as instructed and they seemed to be doing fine. It turns out I had no idea what to look for as I was new to this bee keeping scene. When I showed up for our third workshop, many of the other students were seeing lots of larvae and bee eggs in their frames. My hive had none of that. It only had honey. After much debating, and a friend do a visual check, it was concluded that my hive was without a queen.
Gavin, from Honey Pie Hives and Herbals, quickly rectified the situation and brought me a queen the following night. Queen introductions have to be handled with a little etiquette so the hive bees doesn’t assume the new queen as an outsider and kill her. You know what they say about assuming? It makes an ass out of u and me. To deter this unnecessary assassination, I put a few sheets of newspaper between the two brood boxes. In the bottom are the current bee dwellers, and the queen is placed in the higher brood box. It will take the bees a few days to eat through the newspaper to get to the queen. By that time, they will have gotten use to her pheromones and not consider her as an intruder. It all went according to plan, and now they are one big happy bee family. Bee babies were made, babies were born, pollen was foraged, and honey was made.
I jarred 3 litres of honey yesterday. It is lovely, dark, and full of flavour as most late season honey is foraged from Goldenrod. Only a third of the honey was capped honey so some will have to be stored in the fridge. I am absolutely thrilled about our honey harvest! I have plans for lotions and potions with the collected bees wax as well.
Now on to the birds. As of today, I am tending to 74 chickens. Nine are our laying hens, and the rest are meat chickens at varying ages. We have 24 four week olds, 20 two week olds, and 21 one day olds. I’m not sure how after four years of living here, I morphed into the Chicken Lady from Kids in the Hall but here I am surrounded by chickens. We are on our fourth round of meat chickens this season. We hope to raise most of our own chicken meat for the year. Jess renovated our chicken coop so there is an incubator for the new chicks, a slightly less heated incubator for the two to four week old chicks, and then floor space and outdoor access for our older chickens. In the past we have taken them to an abattoir but Jess would like to do the slaughtering himself this year. I am not so keen on that plan. I am happy to raise them, feed them and clean up after them but frankly I am too squeamish to be part of the slaughtering. That may be due to my city upbringing, or simply a tendency to not want to be grossed out and splattered with chicken blood. I do own a pair of chicken shit boots that I wear in the coop, but I am not sure if I am able to upgrade to chicken blood boots. How many pairs of boots does a girl need anyhow?
We did lose 3 of our hens early this spring. Rambling Rose was getting picked on by the other hens, so we separated her and moved her to her own coop. Every morning she would fly out of her coop and free range around, always staying close to home. One sunny afternoon, my oldest was having a pool party with a few of her friends. Out of nowhere came a black dog who immediately killed Rambling Rose right in front of my daughter and her friends. Luckily it only dampened my daughter’s party for a short time, but unfortunately for Rambling Rose, her party was over. The dog in question was a rescue dog, and had escaped a neighbouring dinner party to do a little recreational hen culling.
Two other hens were killed by a predator in the middle of the night. We have had very few problems with predators in the last four years so we got a bit lackadaisical with our protection plan. Our hens have an electrical fence around their space, and we didn’t always remember to turn it on. One night this spring, something got in and killed two hens. The predator didn’t eat them, just killed them which makes little sense to me. So now we never turn the electric fence off, more to keep predators out and less to keep the hens in. In the last few days, there has been a juvenile Osprey lurking around. Jess spotted him on top of the chicken tractor looking in. I’m not sure the Osprey is old enough to realize our hens our much too big for him.
That just about sums up all my updates on the birds and the bees here at South. I do hope to get some more laying hens, as we sell our eggs and eat quite a few. I have been asked by a few friends if they can buy chickens from us as well. Perhaps next year, I’ll up my chicken count but for right now our meat chickens are just for our family to consume.
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These guys were just hanging out. I offered them a coffee but they would have none of it. The guy on the left was much friendlier than he looks.
letters from the lunchroom 