If It's Not One Thing...
If It's Not One Thing...
Per usual farm business, something is always going "wrong". I guess it's God's way of making sure we don't get bored! Last post, the chickens were dying, and Pancake was our solution. Well, this post's problems are the bees and the chickens, again. But before we get into those, I wanted to share something we did that involved insanely cute baby animals...prepare yourselves!
My grandmother had been hearing birds in her kitchen chimney (a blocked up chimney from an old wood burning stove exhaust that has never been used since they bought the place), and they were getting progressively louder. Come week three, and she was tired of hearing them (and they sounded closer to the port), so she asked Sam or I to reach in and remove the nest. Lo and behold, it was not a bird's nest that we found behind her kitchen wall but four baby raccoons!
Sam and Papa cut a hole through the drywall behind the couch in the living room and used a jackhammer to cut through the concrete block chimney to reach the babies. Their momma had even drug a blanket of some sort all the way down the chimney for them to sleep on! Papa put on a thick pair of gloves and pulled them out one by one
(We captioned this one either "Ahhhhhhh!" or "I'm a scary raccoon. RAWWR!")
Shy baby.
We were a little weary of them at first but soon, we couldn't help ourselves. We had to play with them.
(Cheesin')
For those of you wanting to know what we did with the babies, we called a local animal rehabilitation worker, and she came that evening to pick them up. I'm sure they are being well taken care of!
Here at the farm, we've seen an abundance of wildlife recently. Sam channeled his inner Disney princess and held a bird while he was clearing trees from the u-pick field.
And then we found this...
(Sam's way of telling me I don't need to be scared of the snake because it has no teeth...)
We'd been finding shed snakes skins around the property (in our cars, in the garage) which was starting to make us nervous about tearing out drywall come next month. But according to this website, it's a Black Rat Snake. The younger ones start off more of a brown color and they get darker as they age. They are harmless and actually help keep the mice population down, so Sam ended up releasing it.
After he played with it, of course.
Now for the bee update you've all been waiting for! BIG ANNOUNCEMENT.....(drum roll)....we successfully got the queen when we relocated the hive back in April (yay!).
Interestingly, she either died or (as I suspect) the hive killed her off. Spring time is often a time of supercedure or when a hive will kill the old queen and make a new one to ensure egg production stays at a good rate. Also, bees tend to blame the queen when something traumatic happens (say, they were ripped out of their home and forced into a different one). Either way, according to the development progress of what little larvae was left in the hive, the old queen was alive for about a week before something happened to her. Which resulted in our 19 frames of brood (baby bees) turning into 3 frames with spotty presence of brood. Not good.
We did find evidence of 2-3 queen cells that looked like they had been busted open from the inside. Meaning, we may have a new queen. The lack of eggs present makes us think she is likely on her mating flight. (1-2 week long excursion. The only time a queen will leave the hive, and the only time she will mate in her life). From our calculations, we should start seeing eggs between June 8-June 29. If we don't by June 29, we need to purchase a queen ASAP or find someone willing to give us a frame of brood for the hive to make their own queen.
If you're interested, here is an interesting timeline about the lifecycle of a virgin queen (sorry it's a little blurry).
While we patiently wait for the queen to return, we are picking out bee suits and making plans to inspect the hive again on the 13th of June. In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out what to do about these stubborn chickens of ours. We have 12 laying hens, and right now we are only getting 4 eggs a day. Please tell me I'm not the only one who thinks this is ridiculous! One of our black copper maran (BCM) hens went broody for the second time this season and was taking up residence in the favorite nesting box. The other hens were refusing to lay anywhere else, hence the low egg production.
We moved her to a dog kennel with her very own nesting box inside the coop and locked her in (so she couldn't go back to the corner nesting box). With Mom and Tyger's help, we cleaned the coop, put down fresh wood chips in the floor and the nesting boxes, and tidied up the nesting area. I also started giving the adult hens a scoop of corn feed a day to encourage them to lay. After work that day, Sam bought two four-day-old BCM chicks from a farm in Versailles. That night, we switched the eggs under the broody hen's butt for the baby chicks.
She was one happy momma chicken in the morning!
So after all of that effort, do you think egg production went back up?...nope. Stupid chickens.
Earlier this month, after the purchase of Pancake, we were still losing chickens to hawks and vultures. I made three scarecrows to put up on various points on our property. With the exception of last night (three chickens didn't show back up to the coop...we are hoping they opted for sleeping in a tree to avoid the rain), we have lost no more chickens since deploying these new workers.
Harper is still in isolation. I don't feel the need to move him right now as I'm still enjoying not getting chased around or having to look over my shoulder when I go outside. We're trying really hard to not appear a threat to the teenage roosters we currently have maturing in the flock. Sam built Harper a watering system that holds 4 gallons of water at a time. We need to put some shade on his run, but that's a project for another day.
Rylee helping us with farm work before a wedding!
Pancake seems to be doing well. He "failed" his first farrier visit. He was too skittish for her to work on and actually broke her lead trying to pull away from her when she attempted to clip one of his hooves. We've since hired my cousin Matthew to come work with him everyday over the next couple of weeks to get him comfortable with people. We've seen tremendous progress since Matthew started. Pancake will let us put a lead on him and lead him around the barn lot with no issues. Thanks to the brush that finally came in, Matthew is now working on brushing him down to get Pancake used to us touching places like his legs. Eventually, we need to be able to pick up his feet and hold them so the farrier can do the same. Little steps every day.
One semi-scary thing that also happened to us since the last blog post is that we witnessed a boat catch on fire at the lake. The boat was refueling when the fumes ignited. The bang was loud enough to vibrate the dock, making us think initially the boat had rammed into the dock. We were quickly evacuated for fear the gas tanks on the dock would catch fire and explode, too. Luckily, they didn't, and the managers pushed the boat away and let it burn. It probably burned for twenty minutes with jet skis trying to put out the flames before the firemen showed up and extinguished it from the bank. Who knew that it was typical practice to sink the boats after they catch on fire that severely?
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