Chicken update, an inspirational tale of remorse, retrenchment and rebirth
Sadly our resident vixen chose to celebrate the Jubilee with a daring daytime raid on the chicken run. Within an hour she'd dug into the run, captured and executed our four surviving fowl and carted the corpses off to feed her den of mewling cubs. I was, it's fair to say, pretty grumpy, particularly as I'd spent a week of post prandial evenings lurking around in the rain, full of wine and shotgun primed, ready to dissuade with extreme prejudice the malicious vulpine.
It wasn't to be, the moment the sun came out and we headed off to the pub to toast Good Queen Liz, she (the fox, not the royal) swooped like a swoopy thing and carried off the girls.
So, what to do, well, with an empty run for the first time I took the opportunity to execute a through disinfection and mouse frightening regime, chuck a load of grass seed down, give the land a month of recovery and set about a fox-proofing programme. Step one was trenching, digging a foot-and-a-half-deep,foot-wide trench around the perimeter of the pen, that's about 50 metres of ditch, and the wooded location makes it impractical to get a digger in so that was a very painful afternoon with shovel and spade for myself and our chum Nigel. To be honest Nigel's obsessive attention to detail delivered a very precise trench with vertical sides and neatly finished edges, my half looked considerably less polished but was dug and filled with scalpings before Nigel had finished stage 1 of his earthworm re-settlement programme. In the spirit of teamwork I sat and drank beer until he'd caught up.
Scalpings are golf-ball-sized lumps of flint and granite, delivered to me as 1 cubic meter bags (4 of them) and then distributed to the trench, with shovel and wheelbarrow, then thumped with a cast-iron weight to compact and compress them. Sadly Nigel never recovered from the emotional trauma of my cavalier approach to ditch digging so this was a solo exercise. Which took about a week.... Well I do have real work to do as well.
Final stage was to lay chicken wire stapled to the base of the fence stretching over the trench and about 1/2 a metre into the surrounding countryside. Back breaking work stapling the stuff and then pegging the edges with 100 aluminium tent pegs around the edges. There's an Ebay camping shop that must think I'm really careless pegging out my tent.
So after a month of trauma, travail, trial and trench I set off to my chicken dealer in leafy Leatherhead. Chicken dealers work like crack cocaine vendors, luring you in but knowing once you're hooked you'll keep coming back, each time, a little poorer, a little more realistic, a bit more resigned to the inevitable, a little better prepared, better informed and sharing new anecdotes about bloody foxes.
Here they are then, three new girls at the Barn, I try maintain my pragmatic objectivity and insist on calling them the grey one, the red one and the white one but even so they're already showing their own characters and attitudes. We've had eggs from the white for a week and the first from the grey yesterday, still half-size eggs but it's a good sign, despite a new life which thus far, (it's been a great summer hasn't it?) has been pretty much completely underwater they do seem to be settling in.
And fingers crossed, no cunning incursions from Fox force five (pulp fiction reference for the tarantino fans amongst you).
I'll keep you posted...
Labels: chickens, eglu, fox, foxes, oakwood barn, Omlet, poultry, Scalpings, smallholding, Southmead Poultry, Stuffy
To Bee, or, maybe not, ... sorry
To Bee, or, maybe not, ... sorry
Once again, the bee season (our second) draws to a close, the hardworking little ladies of the Oakwood Apiary prepare for the winter so I thought I'd share a brief review of the season, our successes and as trendy educationalists would have it, not our failures but our learning points (which coincidentally, I've discovered through failing).
Things we've achieved, me and the girls
We've split the original hive into two and grown new queens, one of whom promptly and a little unkindly in my view, took half the second hive off on an adventure. Uncle David thinks he's discovered their new home, there's a colony in a hole in an oak in the wood, now that's not necessarily a bad thing, certainly for the planet, but did make it a bit touch and go for hive two (the plastic Beehaus) as it meant that we had to grow yet another queen to take over the management of the remaining 1/4 of the population, this meant that the Beehaus colony has been pretty much in recovery mode for most of the summer but they're now looking healthy and numerous enough to make it through the winter with a little bit of help from me, (sugar syrup to supplement their honey stores) and a bit of luck. The weakness of this hive results from two contributory factors, both my fault, I split them too early and then they swarmed, which I didn't see coming, this means that there was no surplus of honey from the Beehaus team but hopefully next year will be better, healthier, stronger and fruitful.
The original wooden-hived colony had a very strong year and produced a good crop of honey, but, (and we always knew there'd be a 'but' didn't we?), there are two types of beeswax foundation the beekeeper can supply to his or her bees. The bees build cells on the foundation and fill them with new bees, honey, nectar, pollen, depending on the need. Now, of the two types of foundation used for honey one has thin wire running through it which makes it robust enough to spin the heavy frames full of honeycomb and thus expel the honey, the other, unwired, is too fragile and is intended for the creation of cut-comb. As a novice beekeeper, I was unaware of the bees apparent preference for unwired foundation and gave them a choice, so although very productive I've only gleaned 4 jars of liquid honey, (enough, to be honest, to easily see the Barn through to next autumn) and around 15 pieces of cut comb, honey still in the comb, great on toast or with yoghurt. So another lesson learned and they'll not get the choice next year.
In the meantime, despite their evident reluctance, friends and family will be receiving little gift boxes of goldenly oozing honeycomb, if you can cope with the tiny amounts of wax, the honey is, to my taste, delightful.
So, as November commences the bees are making the most of late warmish weather and topping up their stores for the winter. I've treated both hives for varroa, a nasty parasitic mite that destroys colonies and I've put guards in place to prevent naughty mice from taking up residence in a nice warm winter retreat with a constant supply of sweet comestibles. I suffered a lot of mice damage to the frames in the wooden hive last winter and that's partly why one of my winter projects is the building of another wooden beehive, to which I'll transfer the strong colony next spring. That will free up the old wooden hive for cleaning and enable me to do some much needed housekeeping. I'll then transfer the Beehaus bees to the refreshed old hive and fit the upgrades supplied by the manufacturers to the Beehaus. Honestly it's worse than software (Windows, not Mac obv) Anyway, beekeeping wisdom is that one always needs a spare hive to address the swarming problem and I'm not keen to have more than two active colonies.
Right, that's enough for now, I'm in desperate need of a cup of tea, toast and honey. Definitely time to enjoy the fruits of my (and the bees) labours.
Labels: Beehaus, beekeeping, bees, blogfromthebarn, honey, honeycomb, oakwood barn stuffy, Omlet, omlet eglu smallholding
