Farm Chores

Saturday was beautiful and we took advantage of it by going on a nice bike ride, then heading over to the farm annex to do some chores. Our strong hive was doing really well and I felt confident there were enough bees to make a split and start another hive. Aaron hadn't looked in either hive yet this year, so he was happy to see they were doing well. So well that we actually needed to add another box for honey. Below is a frame full of brood, a sign of a good queen is a tight laying pattern. You can see she is doing an awesome job.



To make a new hive, we took a frame of the youngest (smallest) eggs we could find, the frame above full of sealed brood and a frame with open (you can see larvae in the cells) brood along with two full frames of honey from the previous hive and put them in a nuc box. The idea is that the bees will realize they don't have a queen, and make one from the fresh eggs. We searched each frame very carefully to make sure the queen wasn't on any of them - I hope we didn't miss here, there were a lot of bees on each frame. We leave the bees on the frames, they will tend to the brood and are called nurse bees. They haven't ever left the hive, so they will not return to the original hive. If there are any foragers that get moved, they will simply fly back to the "parent" hive. It's pretty awesome when it works. Now we have to wait 3 weeks and hope they will do their thing.
Aaron scraped off this "burr" comb and found these eggs on it.


The other chore to attend to was to dust the chickens with permethrin for the second time. Some of the girls had been shaking their head a lot, and we thought they might have lice. Luckily I have a great helper (Aaron used to help me, but my mom is much happier to help with chicken chores). Mabel is all ready to be dusted - can you tell it's a bit muddier here than in Hood River?


Then there's Camilla. This chicken has become ridiculously tame. She comes when you call her, and lets you pick her up and carry her around. No complaints.


She's gotten a bit spoiled, and has been getting out of their enclosure and into the barn. The other duty to get done was to raise the pen up so she couldn't fly out anymore.


My dad found this nest she made in the corner of the barn on the top of an alfalfa bale. Sneaky little chicken.