Accidents happen, week #2

Well accidents happen and we have a tough lesson learned. One of the chics died today so we are down to the original three that we anticipated. One of our dogs got in the brooder and her instinct kicked in. We wanted to take some new pictures of them today so here are some updates! We noticed allot of their wing feathers are starting to grow out. Its amazing how fast they seem to be growing. In another few weeks I bet they will be ready to go outside.

Were still working on getting the coop together. I'm pretty solid on a basic square design but I like this triangle design too. I already bought the screen for it so we just gotta get some lumber together, cut up the pieces and put it together.

From Bees to Chickens?

I guess bees were not enough because Shark decided he wanted to have chickens. He set up an appointment to go pick up some chicks last Saturday, 3/14. The guy we got the chicks from lived only about 5 minutes away. We could tell we were getting close to his house when there we chickens all over the road. The guy had to have about 100+ chickens at his house. He was a crazy chicken man.

The original deal was for three chicks; however, when we got there he had four in a box, so it was hard to say no.

One is going to be a white foghorn leghorn type chick which lays white eggs. The other three will be a surprise, but should lay brown eggs. Next step, build a chicken coop. I wonder how many of these chickens will end up being roosters?

Here are some pictures of the chicks the day we brought them home!

Spring 09' has Sprung

Man am I glad Spring is finally here! Its actually been spring time for a few weeks now, but the weather has really improved this past week. The forecast looks 50+ and today we got to go out and took a peak! Both hives seem healthy but we lost the tree hive. I think I'm gonna keep it around for aesthetic value because it was a fun story. I decided to get a good scrapping of honey while we were inspecting them and put it in an empty plastic butter dish. The honey looks really dark, so I don't know what kind of honey it is, but it taste great! The wildflower honey I remember seeing/tasting from my mentors place was really light in color and tasted light too.. this was much more flavorful and creamy even.

I didn't see any brood but maybe its just too early for that. We only went two boxes deep so I did not look in the bottom box, I suspect that is where the majority of the bees and brood are at. In both hives they seemed to be building in only 1/4 of the boxes and going up. There were a few frames on the outside packed with sealed honey in both hives (middle box) but in the top boxes there were frames that didn't even have foundation drawn on them yet, completely blank. I suspect in a few weeks/months they will build up their colony and I'll have to put another box on but for now it seems like they got all the space they need.

From my rough estimation I think I'd be safe to take maybe 4 frames of sealed honey from both hives if I wanted to. I'm not going to yet, gunna have to ask some people at beemaster.com to find out for sure ... but I'd like to try to do the "crush and strain" method of honey collection first...so I'm excited to do that soon.

Today was great, after the inspection allot of the bees followed us to the garage area and our dogs were playing with them. Everyone seemed to have a good time..bees getting the little drops of honey from my gloves and on the ground were focused on that so we could take lots of pictures. While they were busy doing that we decided to practice MARKING so we captured a few and tried it out. Someday I'll have to start keeping track of queens ^^