10 May, 2013

Busy bee watch the world go by

I did my first hive inspection since releasing my queen bee from her little cage yesterday, and am happy to report that the hive is thriving! There was brood in all stages of development from eggs to larvae to pupae to capped, there were cells of stored pollen, and best of all the bees had drawn at least some comb on all eight of the bars I’d started them on. I gave them two more bars to work on, a new jar of sugar syrup, and opened up another entrance to the hive so the foragers would have an easier time getting in and out.

Establishing the hive has been a fit of drama in and of itself. I got my first package of bees this spring from Virginia Bee Supply, one of two local apiaries, after doing my internet research and finding nothing but good reviews. I picked the package up at the end of March, brought it home, went to install it in the hive and…the queen was dead.

A beehive cannot live without a queen. In a normal hive if something happens to her, the workers will make an emergency replacement if they have brood of the right age to turn into a queen cell. But a package of bees doesn’t have any brood, it’s just 3 pounds of loose bees who have to start from scratch. With no queen, they’re basically a headless body and doomed to die.

So I called immediately and let Virginia Bee Supply know that my queen was dead. They told me to wait 3-5 days because there was probably a queen loose in the package. Weather conspired to make me wait a week, and when I opened the hive all I Found was dead bees. I sent them an e-mail to explain that to them, and they told me to combine the remaining bees with another hive. No good, I didn’t have another hive. Anyway, what I had paid for was 3 pounds of bees and a live queen. Not, y’know, 3 pounds of dead bees who just didn’t know it yet. I sent them another e-mail and suggested that the appropriate thing to do at this point would be to refund my money.

And then I didn’t hear from them for two weeks. At which point I e-mailed them again because what I had left was six bees clinging morosely to the inside of the hive. I recapped our previous correspondence and again requested a refund. This time they got back to me and said of course they’d refund me, since they hadn’t heard from me since the initial call to say the queen was dead, they assumed everything was fine.

Insert sound of record screech. Wait, what? I had the e-mail right there in front of me where I explained that I didn’t have another hive and would like a refund please. You know, the one they ignored. Right. Anyway, I got my refund out of them about a month after receiving a box of dead bees flying. Meanwhile I had ordered another package from Pigeon Mountain Trading Company.

I waited anxiously for a ship notice from them, and never got one…but one morning while the neighbor was working on my truck and my CRV was still dead, I got a call from the post office saying that there was a box of bees waiting for me. Wait, what? So I called the neighbor and got him to hurry on my truck and went and got my bees a couple hours later, much to the relief of the postal worker. He was pretty sure the three hitchhikers on the outside of the package meant that the bees were escaping, despite my reassurances.

That second package arrived hale and healthy and ready to go, with a marked queen in her little cage. She was significantly larger than the dead queen in the first package was, for that matter. And her colony is thriving, working away at filling up the hive with comb and brood and food. They’re building beautiful straight comb on the top bars just like they’re supposed to, almost as if they’ve read the same books on top bar beekeeping that I have.

It’s fascinating to just stand outside the hive and watch them work, really. You can get quite close and they do not partiularly care; once you get to about three feet out a guard bee will bonk you with her head to warn you off but otherwise they are too focused on gathering pollen and nectar to bother a quiet human who just wants to stand and watch the foragers zoom in and out.

At any rate, Virginia Bee Supply may be a great place to get hives, and even a great place to get bees if everything happens like it’s supposed to, but my experience suggests they’re rather useless when something goes wrong. Bees from Pigeon Mountain are great, and they have good prices on things like protective gear, but don’t send shipping notices when mailing you three pounds of stinging insects who will make your post office personnel very, very nervous. Hopefully this will be the last time I need to buy a package, though. I don’t intend to go into professional beekeeping, after all, and would like to top out at 2-3 hives. I hope to be able to establish those hives by splitting my original hive, since these are such lovely, peaceful, productive bees. I’ve also contemplated ordering a queen from hardy survivor stock that a localish apiary sells when it’s time to split the hive.

6 May, 2013

I am the chicken grinch.

Every so often, someone writes to me to ask my advice about keeping chickens. Their goals usually boil down to “we want eggs” and sometimes also “we want to teach our children where food comes from.” These are admirable goals, even if the second one is rather dishonest — the eggs in the supermarket do not come from pet hens in backyards but from battery farms where the hens have a space about as large as a sheet of paper. I will go on record as saying I don’t think its a good idea to spring the realities of factory farming on your three-year-old, but neither do I think you need to outright lie.

Anyhoo. This has become more common as the backyard chicken thing takes off, although I think it’s now reached critical mass, and these well-meaning people often have some really drastic misconceptions about what keeping your own chickens means. I am then left with the unenviable position of pointing out all the problems with their plan.

1) You will certainly get fresher eggs, but unless your hens are free-ranging and the majority of their diet coming from pasture and bugs, the nutritional profile of the eggs from your hens is going to be pretty much the same as the ones you get in the supermarket. Free-range eggs are lower in cholesterol and higher in omega fatty acids, but eggs from a hen who lives in a coop in your back yard and eats commercial chicken feed with the occasional snack of kitchen scraps are not free-range hens.

2) Your eggs will not be “hormone free”. Hens in commercial egg farms are not treated with hormones to make them lay, as there’s no need. You can force a hen to lay by manipulating the level of light to which she’s exposed, which is what commercial egg farms do. Dairy is another story entirely.

3) Your eggs will be free of antibiotics. Some commercial egg farms do prophylactically treat hens with antibiotics. They need to because their hens are living in miserable, high-stress conditions. So as long as you’re not treating your hens with antibiotics, your eggs will be free of them. Keep in mind, however, that your hens may get sick and need treatment. They may get worms and need treatment. If you withhold treatment they need in the name of organic breakfast eggs, you’re an asshole.

4) You will not make money on chickens. You just won’t. You cannot compete with the economy of scale that commercial producers can leverage. It will cost you more to keep 3 or 4 hens at home for the eggs than to just buy your eggs at the grocery store, even if you are buying organic free-range eggs. I used to keep a spreadsheet amortizing the cost of feed and chicken facilities over the number of eggs produced. It got too depressing when it bottomed out at around $1 an egg, so I stopped.

You will also not make money selling offspring from your chickens. You are competing with the big hatcheries, and the people who will pay serious money for chickens are not going to want yours unless you have dedicated yourself to building a reputation on the poultry show circuit. This will take you years. There is no financial incentive to keeping chickens on a small scale.

5) There are only two ways to ensure you do not get roosters: either don’t keep chickens, or only buy adult hens. Vent sexing is 80-90 percent accurate, so even if you buy from the commercial hatcheries, you may still end up with a rooster or two. This leads us to another hard truth: as my friend s. e. smith stopped just short of saying when covering this, the name for extra roosters is “food.”

Even people like me, who live in the country and want roosters because we have a self-sustaining dual-purpose flock only need one rooster per ten hens. There is not a large market for pet roosters. It doesn’t matter if he is the sweetest rooster ever, if you tenderly hand-raised him for 8 weeks in a brooder in your spare bedroom, whatever reason you’re trying to convince yourself of. He is a surplus rooster, and the word for surplus roosters is “food.” If you are going to keep chickens, if you are going to hatch some eggs to teach your children about the miracle of life, then you have to come to terms with that.

You can try to sell your spare rooster. If you price him too high, say over $5, the odds are very slim anyone will buy him. If you price him under that, the odds are good that the person who comes to get him is going to eat him. If you can’t handle that, then hatching your own chickens or buying them as chicks is not for you. Stick to buying adult hens.

6) If a breed is “rare” then the odds are the gene pool is small and unhealthy. Someone is going to be upset with me for saying that, but it’s sadly true. Blue-laced red Wyandottes, a very pretty chicken, are the type I’ve seen it in most recently. They have a hard time thriving as chicks, and even as adults seem prone to mysteriously dying at a higher rate than other chickens.

People will try to tell you that “inbreeding doesn’t matter” with chickens. These people are at best misguided and at worst consciously lying to you. Chickens that have been relentlessly linebred for a particular look will have problems with fertility, with thriftiness, and with hardiness. You will end up babying them along and they’ll still drop dead at an alarming rate. THe problem here is that to keep an inbred line of animals healthy, you must cull relentlessly for fertility, thriftiness, and hardiness. Most people don’t. Beginner chicken owners are better off with a common breed purchased from a large hatchery, where egg-laying productivity matters, unless you want to have to coddle your chickens along for not much return.

If you truly want chickens who can thrive free-ranging with minimal human intervention, look for a flock of farmyard mutts. Local predators will have done the culling if the farmer didn’t do it herself.

7) The very last brutal disillusionment I have for would-be chicken owners: hens are loud. A hen’s egg-song is often just as loud as a rooster’s crow, and goes on for a lot longer. A hen will yell the characteristic “BWOCK BWOCK BGAWK” for as long as five minutes straight without ceasing. There are individual variations, of course, just as there are individual variations in pitch, length, and volume of rooster crows. But you should probably let go of the idea that you’re going to be able to keep chickens in an urban or suburban setting without your neighbors noticing.

3 May, 2013

Where to even start…

So, yes, been very quiet here. This is my fault. A long time ago I decided I wanted this blog to be a kind of cheery happy place, and made an effort to keep posts light and fluffy. Of course, then life turns out to be the kind of thing that is not cheery and happy all the time, and when that happens I wind up going silent, because I feel like I can’t post anything, having promised myself that I would stay cheery and happy here.

Right. Probably an unreasonable expectation of myself, really. So after a lot of pondering, here is what I’ve decided to do: blog anyway. Which means that sometimes I might be sort of grumpy, and sometimes sad, and sometimes stressed, but hey! Life is life and I can’t pretend mine is flawless without just…not talking.

So let’s catch up on what’s happened since December, you want to?

I spent most of January feeling like hell, which continued into February, when all became clear.

In February I wound up in the Emergency room with a kidney stone due to a massive pocket of infection in my left kidney; since we don’t have insurance that was a huge bill. I am lucky to have parents who can help us out and grateful that the Best Parents Ever wanted to help us out and did, but at the same time it’s kind of humiliating to be 36 years old (37 this month!) and asking your parents for thousands of dollars to pay your medical bills.

In March, Daniel got a job! Huzzah! A real job, full time, with benefits including health insurance! And he so far claims that it does not suck and he is not miserable, so that is exciting and I am happy about it! We also got a good chunk of the garden in the ground, at least the cold-tolerant seeds. This spring was unseasonably cool, with threats of frost intot he first week of April.

In April, the Manor saw about 10,001 new arrivals and the garden planting finished. Ten thousand of the new residents came together in th form of a 3lb package of bees, which I’ve established in a hive in our oak grove. So far so good, they are doing their bee thing. At the moment we are at the “don’t bother them, let them build comb and forage” stage which is killing me from sheer curiosity. I’ll be able to look in on them again next weekend. The other new arrival was Chism, a 6 month old Nubian buck who wasn’t doing well in his last home. He’s here for the 4 R’s: Rehab, Rest, Relaxation, and Rehoming. The first three R’s are going pretty well, although it’s going to be a long road getting him up to snuff. Hopefully once he is a great hairy stinking honking goat buck I can find him a good place, although I may also end up having him wethered and finding him a pet home. We’ll see how he does.

And in May, Natasha arrived. She’s a red-eyed white English Angora bunny, 8 weeks old. Her fiber will be available when she gets her periodic shearing (I don’t have the hand stamina to pluck a bunny). At the end of the month, a blue male English Angora bunny, unrelated to Tasha, will arrive. More fiber!

June may be pretty quiet, and we’re hoping that Queen May is pregnant and will present us with goatlings (cross your fingers for girls) in July.

Meanwhile, today was my last final exams, and I need to get busy restocking The Holy Goats Emporium. Soap and lotion will continue to be available while I have goats in milk (which should be, with a little luck and care, continuous). Angora bunny fiber will be available later this year, and then next year when the bees are producing I’ll be introducing salves and lip balms using wax from my own hive. If the mysterious herbs I’ve planted this spring get to growing and thriving, then there may also be bath teas later. Exciting!

Hope you’re doing well, gentle readers, and that there’s still a couple of you out there!

13 December, 2012

Moving Right Along

Math final on Saturday and then I’m done until the beginning of January, when I start my last semester at my friendly little community college. Then I have to make some decisions about things like big scary four year universities. Aie!

Beauty and her surprise baby continue to do well despite cold temps; she’s a very attentive and thoughtful mother. The other chickens are all irate because they’re locked up, but the hawks just will not leave them alone. I think it’s the influx of transient winter hawks crowding the ecosystem around here, and the chickens may therefore be locked up until they move on in the spring. Just the other morning, Daniel spotted the sharp-shinned hawk who’d been terrorizing our chickens standing next to the grow-out pen, window shopping. It let him get to within ten feet before flapping lazily off.

There’s not a terrible lot of exciting news, really. We’re chugging along, prepping garden beds and caring for goats and chickens and waiting for spring!

5 December, 2012

Tiny little surprises

Another long gap — I’m coming up on finals week at school, plus getting orders sent out for the Holy Goats Etsy shop. No rest for the wicked, and all that.

But I couldn’t resist sitting down to tell y’all about our most recent adventure. As I’ve mentioned, we’ve had hawks in the area. Several chickens have gone missing, and after an incident three days ago with a sharp-shinned hawk who tried to take a hen and subsequently got his feathery butt kicked by our Old English Game rooster, they’ve been on lockdown again. They are not amused.

Among the chickens who were missing was one of our favorites, the little bantam Easter Egger hen named Beauty. She’s been a prolific and reliable little layer although flighty and skittery and disinclined to hang out with human beings. We just assumed that the hawk had gotten her, paused for a sad moment of silence, and moved on.

Until yesterday, when as I was setting up for morning milking, Daniel called to me from over by the woodpile. “I found out where Beauty’s been!” he said. “Come and see really quick!” I walked over, and there was our little missing hen, being followed by a teeny tiny chick, still young enough to have the egg tooth on its beak.

A quick scour of the area turned up her nest. We’d put the top half of a covered litterbox down to offer some shelter to free-ranging chickens, and she’d laid her eggs and brooded right there, within six feet of the door to the bantam pen. Evidence suggested that two or three eggs had hatched, and that Beauty had scuffled with something in defense of her brood but only managed to save the one. We felt that especially since he’s a singleton, she had a better chance of raising him that we do, so gently herded the two of them into a little pen and set them up with food and water and shelter and straw to snuggle down in. They were doing fine this morning when I looked in on them.

26 November, 2012

Well that was exciting.

Yesterday was the monthly Total Goat Stall Renovation, which involves removing approximately 60 cubic feet of used bedding from the goat stalls and moving it to the compost heap. During all this activity we noticed a hawk calling repeatedly — it was pretty unusual, since in our experience they’ll call once or twice and then shut up, presumably for fear of attracting crows.

At any rate, we finished up and went back inside and I happened to glance out the back window while taking my boots off just in time to see a hawk swoop in. I immediately pulled my boots back on and ran outside to find the hawk on the ground with a 12 week old Speckled Sussex pullet pinned. Feeling that the life of a pullet was worth more than my dignity, I ran straight at it yelling obscenities, at which point the hawk took off and the pullet scooted into a hollow log.

As the hawk hit the trees finally the crows saw it and began their usual raptor persecution routine, FINALLY. I dumped the pullet out of the hollow log and checked her over, she was totally fine. Lost a few feathers but no serious injuries, evidently the hawk hadn’t hit her with any of its talons and hadn’t had a chance to get its beak on her.

The chickens are now on lockdown for an undetermined period of time. This morning when we came out not just the adult hawk but a juvenile were sitting in the oak trees, patiently waiting for us to let their breakfast out. Hahaha, hawks, joke is on you. There’s two little hens who don’t sleep in the pens that are in danger, but the rest of the flock is safely locked up for now and I’m thinking of setting out feeding stations with all kinds of snacks preferred by crows.

21 November, 2012

The herd shrinks in preparation for spring growth

I can’t believe Thanksgiving is tomorrow. We’ll be heading down to see my parents, and Frankie and First will be riding along to go to their new home. With Josie off being bred in preparation for her move to Wisconsin, that takes the herd down from 12 to 9 goats. Once Sophie is a little older I’ll probably also offer her for sale, but for right now I’m interested in seeing how she looks as she grows up, so she’ll hang out for a while.

In other news, there’s not a lot of other news! Finals week is approaching at school, I’m making soap like a fiend, and Daniel is working a part-time job to help keep us all fed.

How are you, gentle reader?

18 November, 2012

What a week!

Whew! Thanks so much to all of you who helped make the launch of the Holy Goats Emporium Etsy Shop a huge success. I’m embarrassed to say that the response in fact overwhelmed my cautious preparations, so now I’m feverishly making soap to restock and waiting on a shipment of lotion bottles so I can restock that, too. My goodness!

On the plus side, the goats have totally paid for their own feed for the month of November through the profits from sales this week! Yay goats! I think this is the first time a hobby of mine has ever shown signs of being self-sufficient, and given that I’m still unemployed having the goats paying for their own food is all to the good.

At any rate, y’all will be the first to know when the shop is restocked; look for lotion to come first (probably just in time to miss the massive retail fuss around Black Friday, sigh) and then the soaps will start going up as soon as they’re cured in early December.

12 November, 2012

Patience is not my strong suit

So yesterday I worked like a bugger to get the shop ready to open, and then just couldn’t wait until Tuesday to open it. So as of this morning you may visit Holy Goats Emporium for your soap and lotion needs. As a thank you to my faithful readers, use the code BLOG10 to take 10% off your order!

31 October, 2012

That was a close one.

We’re all fine here at the Manor post-Sandy. The goats were a little grumpy about having to spend 2 days indoors, but they got over it with the massive application of piles and piles and piles of tasty hay, and also love. Things are getting back to normal now.

The other reason I missed Monday’s posting (and queueing one up for this morning!) is that I have been busy busy busy with my splendiferous, fabulous new project.

I wasn’t going to tell y’all about it until it actually happened, but I find that I am getting way too excited to keep it to myself, so I will make you be excited with me: on November 13, I’ll be opening an Etsy shop with all kinds of home-made goodness — soaps and lotions using milk from my gracious, generous, giving goat ladies. All of the products are handmade right here at the Manor, from scratch. Daniel would probably prefer that I stop doing it in his kitchen, but y’all will have to buy a LOT of stuff to build me a soap studio, so for now he has to deal. The shop name “Mixed Blessings” was taken, so if you would like soaps and lotions made using milk from happy goats, you’ll be buying from the Holy Goats Emporium, shop name Holy Goats.

I didn’t start out to be sacrilegious, but then I realized that the phrase “Chickens, dogs, and holy goats” has exactly the same rhythm as “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” and I was sold. I dropped the first two, though, since neither chickens nor dogs are involved in the lotions and soaps.

There won’t be a terribly large range at first, but I’m looking to expand as I find out what sells, and of course there will be a discount code for the grand opening just for you who are my faithful blog readers (Hi Dad!).

I jest, I know for a fact that there’s more than my Dad out there reading. What’s hilarious is that the Best Mother Ever is not, in fact, a regular reader, and thus gets all her blog news from my Dad if I don’t remember to call her and tell her first.

So there you go, gentle readers. We survived the storm and now you know what’s been keeping me hopping like a frog on a hot griddle.

How are you?

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