Bee facts

The more I read about bees the more amazing I find them. I used to eat honey like it was going out of style... well I still do, but now I appreciate it a lot more. Here are a few things to think about when thinking of bees and honey.

Honey is bee food. It is not made as a bi-product that humans can eat. So when you eat honey, you are eating the food that the bees made in order to live and to maintain the lives of the bees in the hive. When you take honey, you must understand that you are taking food from your hive and thus are risking their health.

Honey is also bee medicine. As honey is anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and a whole lot more they eat it as food, but they also use it to maintain the health of the colony.... so think about this when you take honey. Especially when you expect to have a hard winter.

Additional bee facts:

*Bees from the same hive visit about 225,000 flowers per day. One single bee usually visits between 50-1000 flowers a day, but can visit up to several thousand.

*Queens will lay almost 2000 eggs a day at a rate of 5 or 6 a minute. Between 175,000-200,000 eggs are laid per year.

*The average hive temperature is 93.5 degrees.

*Beeswax production in most hives is about 1 1/2% to 2% of the total honey yield.

*About 8 pounds of honey is eaten by bees to produce 1 pound of beeswax.

*Honeybees are the only insects that produce food for humans.

*Just a single hive contains approximately 40-45,000 bees!

*During honey production periods, a bee's life span is about 6 weeks.

*Honeybees visit about 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey.

*A bee travels an average of 1600 round trips in order to produce one ounce of honey; up to 6 miles per trip. To produce 2 pounds of honey, bees travel a distance equal to 4 times around the earth.

*Bees fly an average of 13-15 mph.

I took these facts from : http://www.indianchild.com/bees.htm. They can actually be found in pretty much any beekeeping book or book with bee information.

So just remember when you have beeswax candles that all the wax that goes into them took a long time for the bees to create.

Death of a cock

Too bad. =( It was my white face, black spanish. He was really gorgeous and I was hoping to keep him and eat the Blue Andalusians. I found him under the bridge but without any marks on him. I'm thinking it was probably the heat. I'm not sure, but we'll keep watching over them. I saw him yesterday and he was fine. He was hiding his head under his wing to stay cool in the morning.

So now we have the dorking cocks and the blue andalusians for our breeding.. =P I guess they will do. They both are very fast developing and well built birds breeds. None of them are skittish and we'll still have the Spanish pullets to work with. The Andalusian cocks don't show the true blue but white with some blue markings.. we'll see how that shows up in the genetic make up of the chicks.

They're only 3 months old (on the 15th) but already they are bigger than the Amaurecanas. So we might end up with some pretty good sized meat birds that also lay well. We'll see. =)

Coyotes

Soo, we lost another guinea last night. They took the male and I was woken up by the female looking for her mate. She was kind of sad walking around calling for her mates. If she's not eaten tonight then we're most likely see about slaughtering her and putting her in the freezer. Either way.. it's not the way we wanted her to go.

Home

There are so many different meanings to this word... I like what we've found. I love:

walking to the backyard and picking grains
digging ponds or holes
watching the chickens fight over bread and running over to see what we have for them
watching the ducks swim in the pond when they don't think we're looking
coming home to a clean house
watching the goats dance around and do a happy goat dance
keeping the goats from eating my trees
having plants that actually grow because the animals aren't eating them
seeing the bees enjoy their home
watching wild pollinators fly around
watching the sun set
being surrounded my family and feeling loved
getting to work on my house
working on projects
being with friends
being able to invite friends and family over
having a turkey stand on my shoulder because they like it when I walk around with them
having sleepy cats pretend that they weren't asleep
growing my own food
slaughtering my own meat

There is a lot that I love and a lot more to be thankful for. Thank you all for sharing this with us.

Characteristics of our flock

It might be that we did not raise the ducks and the guineas from day olds, but the rest of our flock has a tendency not to be skittish nor shy. We walk out and we have a flock of chickens run over to see what we're doing and what we're bringing. They wait for the water and food and they also like coming over just to see what we're doing. When we sit on the bridge to watch them they just sit or stand by us to catch the same view. When we got these breeds we were going for the heritage breed characteristics but were also hoping that they would not be true to the descriptions of "skittish, flighty, avoids human contact" I think we got a good bunch and we look forward to breeding them so that others can have these interactive tame birds.

The same can be said for our turkeys. They let us pet them and come over to see what we're doing. I look forward to their breed.

Why I love Jed

Soo, Jake, Jed's brother, once asked if I had gotten too attached to the pigs thus preventing me from slaughtering them. I had to laugh.. =)

On the other hand, we have Bugger that runs after Jed and jumps on his lap whenever he goes out side and sits down. She is what we might call a "lap goat" she sits there and just fawns over Jed. Jed carries her around and plays with her and lets her sit on his lap while he pets here.

Jed has also taken a liking to the little bantam chickens because they totally have the "Napoleon complex" they seem to not be aware that they are 1/4 the size of the other chickens.

It's been an amazing trip going from no farm animal experience to seeing Jed take care of the animals and help me milk the goats when I just don't have any time. I think he's actually enjoying himself. =) I just hope he doesn't mind when we have to make chicken appetizers out of the bantam cocks.

Talking about bantam cocks: Next time you read To Kill a Mockingbird take notice of chapter 17 when Scout describes Ewell as a bantam cock. It's hilarious as hell if you get the references to the antics of banties.

Exploding egg of doom

I was out back when I heard a loud "POP!" I had an idea of what it was and my idea was confirmed when the ducks jumped up and started quacking. They have been laying on a set of eggs and I figured that the once that weren't fertilized were going to start exploding if I didn't move them away... well they did. One popped underneath one of the ducks and they all ran over to the pond (BTW, I was frustrated the other week and I dug a pond that is about 4.5 feet deep in some areas about 9 feet long and about 6 ft wide in some areas) and they washed off. I walked over laughing because my first thought was "that duck is never going to go broody again" They're still laying on the remainder of the eggs so we'll see what happens. Not sure if any of the eggs were fertilized but we'll find out soon enough. I wish I could take them away for a bit and candle them. I might just do that tomorrow night to see if there is anything in the eggs. We're due a shipment of poultry next week and if there are any ducks I might just put them under the ducks so that they can raise them as their own. I hope we get some meat ducks... Rouen would be nice, or maybes some pecking.