Sunflowers About To Pop

Mammoth sunflowers along fence

First year asparagus bed with herbs and calendula in between

How To Move a Beehive, Summer Radicchio, and Little Chicken Buddies

This has been a big week.  I slimmed down my apiary by selling 2 splits.  2 of my chickens went to live at Garden Dreams and I sold 3 more, and I came up with a delicious sauteed radicchio recipe.

14 week old Delaware and Silver Laced Wyandotte join the Garden Dreams' Flock.  They are sticking together.

How to Move a Beehive:

Day before, strap the hive tightly together with a rachet strap.  Close any top entrance, either by using a ventilated inner cover/moving screen, or positioning the outer cover so it blocks the top entrance in the inner cover before strapping down.

At night once all bees are in for the night, cover the entrance with window screen.  Staple into place, use duct tape or force in snugly in a V shape.

Move in early morning (or at night but only if you can clearly see what you are doing!)  Place the hives facing the cab of the truck, in the bed of a truck.  Do not move beehives inside of a car and do not move when temperatures are below 50 degrees, as the bees will try to cluster inside the hive and may get jostled out of the cluster by the bumping about! Secure the hives in the truck bed.  Drive carefully to the new location.

Once in the new location, leave them alone for a few hours to relax as they will be grumpy from the jostling drive.  Make sure they have ventilation with a screened bottom board/screened entrance.  When you are ready to remove the screen over entrance, do so and quickly stuff some grass in the hole.  Use a bit of smoke to back them off from the entrance before removing screen.  Don't force the grass in so tightly that the bees can't remove it with a bit of work.  Then, place a branch not blocking the entrance, but in front of it, so bees have to maneuver around it as they exit.  This will cause them to reorient.  They will likely do this anyways because of all the new landmarks.  

These steps have worked for me moving hives about 3.5 miles away and farther.  I have moved both at night and in the early morning. Moving closer than 3 miles may cause the bees to return to the old hive site.

Split strapped together with ratchet strap.

Once the bees have all returned for the evening, the bit of screen is used to cover the entrance.   

Sauted Radicchio:

Quarter the radicchio head and then halve or quarter those sections.  Leave the core intact to hold the sections together.  Toss with a olive oil, cider or red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, a bit of honey.  Saute in a covered pan, flipping the sections to get color on each side.  Yum.

Palla Rossa Radicchio

Ready for the saute pan

My Small Apiary

How Things are Growing

Plants are a-growin' here at home.  What have we here....

My Sweet Bay Magnolia by Jason's Studio

The Chicken Arena

Two Apple Trees Growing Well

Gray Dogwood and Potted Herbs

A View of the Sheet Mulched Garden Beds

Garden Beds

King of The Mountain

3 Peas in a Pod

Raspberry Row

Strawberries

A Space for Bee Equipment

Yesterday, Jason and I cleaned out the basement room where we brooded the chicks and turned it into my new beekeepin' studio/garden storage spot.  I am very pleased to finally have a space dedicated totally to storing garden tools and building bee boxes.  Hooray for dedicated space!

My new bee space!  Where once we brooded chicks, bee boxes will now be built.

Bee building studio in the daylight.  

How I build my frames: a strip of foundation gives the bees something to build off of. 

I use medium frames

I am attempting to be better about labeling my frames with the year they go in the hive so I can rotate out old brood comb once it gets too funky.

How to Change the Mood of Broody Hen

Broody Little Red Hen

The term often used to describe changing the mood of a broody hen is "breaking a broody hen."  The language may not sound gentle, but for Little Red Hen as we call her, it seemed a welcome relief.  She was just in need of a bit of encouragement to change her mood.  I admit, she is my favorite in the flock and the only one that we call by name.  

Going broody means the hen camps out in the nest box.  Permanently.  In Little Red's case, other hens would kick her out so they could lay eggs and then right back she would go to sit on the eggs.  When I reached around and under her to get the eggs anyone else has laid in there, she bristled up like a porcupine and screeched with irritation when normally the hens don't mind a bit of searching for eggs if they are in the nest boxes.  

Broodiness is a mothering instinct.  The chicken of choice in industrial egg factories are White Leghorns, and they have had the broodiness bred right out of them.  They are little egg laying machines, and in the industrial setting, doomed to a short life of confinement, stress, and constant laying.  Leghorns in a happier setting can be great farm chickens and just as productive, but they are lighter, smaller, more nervous, and are better flyers.  Little Red Hen is a Partridge Rock, a dual-purpose old-fashioned hen, yet good for an urban setting.  She is heavier than a leghorn, a great forager, can stay warmer in the winter, and like other older breeds, still retains the broodiness trait.  And she lays pretty pale brown eggs.  Well, she did until she went broody.

The hens are a few months over a year old and this was the first broody hen I have had.  Her instinct is to sit on her clutch of eggs and hatch them out as chicks, but we have no rooster so these eggs will never hatch, no matter how hard she tries.  I could have put her in her own private space with some fertile eggs or chicks procured elsewhere, which can sometimes work, but there is no guarantee she will be a competent mother and frankly, I didn't have time for that when she went broody so I just let her sit on the nest for two weeks.  Having a broody hatch some eggs is definitely something I want to try at some point, but this was not the time.   

After weeks of her sitting in the nest, we had a heat wave and she was just hot and pissed off, sitting on the nest full time with no success and me taking away all the eggs.  It just wouldn't do, so, I set up our go-to dog crate with food and water near the coop.  It was under a covered area so she couldn't get rained on, and I put hardware cloth down in the bottom so she wouldn't twist an ankle.  I propped it up on bricks to let the air flow up underneath her.  A broody hen wants a warm, dark nest.  To put her in a lighted, airy cage with no bedding can change her mood.  After 1.5 days in the cage, I let her out.  The whole day she ran around with the flock and happily foraged. Then, late afternoon, I caught her on the nest.  Two hours later, she was still there.  So, back in the cage for another 24 hours.  After that, she was broody no more and happily back to digging worms.