Backyard Chickens & Bees

I mentioned in the last post that George, one of the older hens in the flock, was looking pretty sick and acting very lethargic. This was especially apparent when we reintroduced the new chicks to the older hens and George was not chasing them around and asserting her dominance. Even loud Emily was doing more [...]

We tried to integrate the young chicks with the chickens a few weeks ago, but George had other plans and constantly attacked the little chicks (they were only about a month old at the time). So, we separated them again and let the chicks get a bit larger so that they would be able to [...]

Time for an update on the bees, since we’re now at week 4.5, they have drawn out over 85% of the first box (that is, 8½ frames out of 10 are almost fully drawn out), and I put on a new deep/brood box. The general rule of thumb that we learned from both bee classes [...]

Ah, Spring. In particular… ah, April and May and rain and all I have to do is keep the weeds and bindweed at bay, and ramble on about it all. The gardens are all coming along nicely, despite my best efforts. I thought I had somehow killed all the raspberries by missing a day of [...]

Well, we introduced the older chickens and the 11 new chicks this past weekend. For now they are being supervised, as George likes to chase them around (she is, surprisingly, the dominant one; Emily is just very vocal about it all: see the video below for a demonstration) and pecked at a few, resulting in [...]

So I wanted to add to my previous post about the bee-keeping class we took last weekend with Glen Andresen. My wife, Veronica, felt that it was overly technical and didn’t really express how fun and informative the class actually was, so I feel I should clarify that point. I really enjoyed the class with [...]

We participated in a second bee-keeping class yesterday, this time with Glen Andresen as the instructor. He’s a local (as in, about a mile from our house) master gardener who has a bee yard on his property, has raised bees for close to 15 years, has some 35+ bee colonies in three locations, retrieves bee [...]

We heard a bit of a commotion from the hens late tonight and looked out the window to see that the murderous black-and-white dog was back and trying to get into the coop! I chased him off and put on the egg-laying light inside the roost to be able to see and maybe make the [...]

We had a dog vs. chicken attack this past weekend on my property. Veronica and I came home from running errands and noticed a dog standing by the raised beds with his back to us. As soon as we got out of the car, he turned around and we saw that there was one of [...]