Just call me the bee tamer!

Oh yes! I just picked up that bee! got to learn to do this if I am going to raise queens.

Mr chicken

Mr chicken lost several toes to frostbite this winter. He was too big and fat to jump up into the coop with the other chickens and too big of a sissy to let is catch him every night to put him in. So now until  his little toe stumps heal he has to be away from his girls. He really hates that. But if I turn him out into the run with the girls, they eat what is left of his toes. So for now, he's in solitary. The younger roosters are liking the arrangement though, they get the girls all to themselves. Something tells me I won't have a problem with the eggs being fertile this year. It's almost time to hatch out some chicks!

April/May hatch

Yes I am crazy. I am going to incubate some eggs. I have a bizarre assortment of birds and I would love to see what kind of chicks I get out of them. My roosters are blue laced red wyandottes. My hens are cochins, silver laced wyandottes, black australorpes, rhode island reds, barred rocks, buff orpingtons, naked necks (google those for real), and auracaunas. I have made my best guess on which hen layed which egg so it will be interesting to see if I am right.

I am also helping one of my friends, TinCanAssassin with a homeschool lesson on chicken development. Just for kicks and giggles, I am going to post everything here for you guys as well. Here is a hatch calender for reference.

If I start these tomorrow, they will hatch on my sons birthday. I think he would like that.

Pic of the day

One of my favorite hive pics.

Bee pic

Hubby checking for a queen. This is a good strong hive.

Pics

I am going to post pics of whateer is going on around here in the in between days when I don't have anything to blog about. I got some pretty cool ones during our last hive inspections.

Just me with our strongest and weakest hives.

Bees and bunnies and seeds, Oh My!

It must bee spring. We traveled to California to pick up seven packages of bees last week. It was a nice trip but feel really bad for the bees. They went from an 80 degree climate where everything was blooming to high 20s and snow. Most of them fared really well, but we ran into some problems yesterday while checking hives.

This package was so cold they went into a dormant state. I thought they were all dead until I broke out the trusty hair dryer and warmed them up. There was an even bigger ball of bees sitting on the bottom of the hive (the last place you want your bees balled up) I am hoping the queen was somewhere in that pile of bees safe and warm. Today is supposed to be warmer so we will see if they get out and fly.

Another problem we had not expected was the difficulty of finding the queen on the foundationless frames. Out of all seven hives, we only found one queen and she immediatly flew out of the hive. I watched her zoom in and back out a couple of times before I lost sight of her so I hope she want back in and settled her court back into making comb.

There is a very big difference between productivity in some hives and others. Some were doing nothing at all, some had already started building comb. I know which hives I will pull my drones from!

I am going to attempt queen rearing this year using the nicot system. It's just too hard to climatize bees from other locations to our weird crazy weather here. I am going to use my nuc queen (now named Charlotte) as my mother queen and drones from my most productive hives as my breeder drones. I have a few ideas on how to select which drones I want an ensure that is who she mates with but I will go into that later.

My Utah hive is queenless. Don't know how that happened as her hive is incredibly strong. There was only one emergency queen cell in the hive (which broke open as we seperated two frames, grrrr.) So I know she didn't swarm. It is still so cold right now I would have a hard time believing they could swarm yet anyway. Our last remaining Nevada hive has been very weak. When we opened it yesterday, there were only about 200 bees and the queen was very weak. We decided to kill two birds with one stone and combine the Utah and Nevada hives. What in the world am I going to call THAT mixture!?!? Maybe I should name her Gracie. A Utah queen in a Nevada home. Hrmmm. That has possibilities, lol.

We got the first of our rabbits a few weeks ago, his name is Max. He has lived his whole live as an ignored house bunny. He was well fed and petted once in a while but he has obviously never been outside. We put him out during the day in a large excercise pen.. He jumps and twists and has decided that he is a wild jackrabbit. Until nightfall when he crawls into his crate and shivers. Being domestic reallly isn't all that bad I guess.

I have been getting so excited to start my garden this year. I just have to find a way to kick all of the chickens out of the back yard first. They seem to think my raised beds are their own personal dust baths.

That's the basic quick catch up on what's been going on in the world of Gracie. I am really going to try hard to get better as this whole blogging thing.

What a month!

Holy crazy month. I have been just swamped. I had events 4 out of the last 6 weekends with Damsel. It was pretty amazing. I was able to complete the director training program and promoted up two ranks during the program. I gained so much. So much confidence, so much joy and contentment. My goal when I began this Damsel path has always been to build an incredible team, to help my family, and to give back. In January with the help of my friends we raised $500 for the Gaston family. In February we raised over $400 for the Pratt family. This month we are working hard to help a sweet little 2 year old boy with liver cancer.

I also sort of fell into an activism role. I offered to help sponsor a giveaway for a new fb page called 1 Million Moms Against Gun Control. I also offered to help in any way I could. So when the awesome creator decided to take her dream bigger I was happy to help. So I am now the Nevada lead for what is becoming a nationwide nonprofit with an aim at providing education, awareness, and support on rights issues. We are actually even discussing expanding to the full constitution and not just focusing on gun rights. Being involved from the start in this is pretty cool.

I have had to take a brake this week from everything as I was feeling run down but I am loving it. Loving the ability to nurture my passions. Enjoying the meeting of new people. It truly has been an incredible joy.

New digs for the girls

We are going to be adding seven new hives to the apiary this year. I hope they like blue!

Pictures of our winter killed hive

Queen cell from different angles. This hive swarmed last summer before we bought it from a neighbor.

There were several frames of beautiful capped honey in this hive. They starve to death while attempting to chew through the caps.

Bee butts. This is a pretty good indication that they starved.

I am pretty sure this was caused by an infestation of varroa mites that we din't catch until it was too late in the year to do anything about it. I lost two hives to varroa this year and have one more struggling. They were eating a few days ago when I checked on them, but they don't seem to have the numbers that the Utah hive does. I hope it makes it.