First Flight of The Year

Sunshine.

It has been a difficult few days. As a few of you know my beautiful brother Sam died almost 2 weeks ago. We bury him on Friday and it is too desperate to contemplate. So today, when we looked out of the window into the winter garden in the sunshine and saw the familar vortex of honey bees taking the opportunity to stretch their wings and breathe the air it gave us a little hope. 

On Friday, please pray for sunshine.

Kx

New Year, New Experiences

Happy 2015.

It's been colder and for longer than in January 2014. As the bees did not take anywhere near as much sugar syrup this year we assume they had good supplies and did not need to supplement them as much.

Jobs for 2015 include the following

• Replace the pine brood box with cedar wood. The current box is too soft and damp and is showing signs of breaking down.
• Replace the frames in the brood box. The ones in there are gunked up and falling apart.
• Build a shelter over the hive to protect it from rain and wind. We have heard this will increase honey yield.

Thankfully the lovely people at Thornes Beehives had a January Sale. I love a good sale and the bee supplies were no exception.

This morning the box arrived. Meticulously packed with processed recycled cardboard it was a treat to receive.

We've bought 50 flat pack frames for honey supers, flat pack frames for the brood body, spring feed as I'm worried the lack of Autumn feeding may leave them short of supplies in  spring if the cold winter continues.  And we've bought a thing called a Hive Duvet. this is actually a piece of foam cut to size. At £2 who could turn it down?

We also bought Porter bee escapes (the lozenge shape items) and the bag of Ambrosia bee bread which is basically a large pack of fondant icing. At thirteen of your english pounds it's pretty expensive so i need to look into how you make it yourself. I can't help feel fresh is best.

How are the buzzy girls.

I was worried about the bees because it's been cold and months since i've seen the delightful vortex of bees flying in sunlight. So, being a herbalist, I took my stethoscope to the end of the garden and had a listen. At first I could only hear the air craft flying over head but when it passed I could still hear a distinct hum. Quite a relief which was compounded when, having accidentally tapped the back of the brood box with the bell of the stethoscope, a couple of the guard bees came out to see what I was up to.

All good news!

Happy January :-)

Bee Keeping and Honey

Spreading a Little Joy.

This is a short blog post.

A couple of months ago I added another honey super to my hive. It was flat packed and I had to build it myself. So it is with great joy I can announce that it's absolutely chock full of honey. Ooozing with it. 

Last week a photographer called Laura Allen came to take some pictures of the hive. We're working together on a book-details of which when the project is no longer a secret-and we needed some pictures representing honey. She also needs some eggs to post so she  was deeply disappointed (not) to leave with half a dozen freshly laid eggs in various colours.

There are lots of lovely pictures to follow but here is one to be going on with. 

This was never intended to be a glamour shot but boy do i look like a bee keeper and oddly, for those in my family just like my sister Ellinor who is much taller, slimmer and darker than I am. Goodness but genetics will out in the most peculiar moments.

What you see here is a honey frame. The white area is capped honey comb and that frame weighs around a couple of kilos. The ladies were surprisingly relaxed with us as we tidied up the hive and removed burr comb.

As soon as I have more pictures I will share them with you but in the mean time please pop along to Laura's blog. She is an amazing photographer and artist. I love her work and feel extremely privileged to be working with her.

TTFN 

Katherine

Catching Up

Lots To Say

The bee keeping season has been in full swing for a couple of months and we've been so busy doing I haven't had time to write. As a general summary, you know we lost a chicken, Goose our beautiful rescue kitten was a wanderer and was killed in the road and the two girls are buried together in our garden.

We have 3 new hens who are taking a little time to settle in partly because our older girls aren't keen to share. The new girls are two dominos, grey white with flecks of black in their feathers and nice red combs and wattles they are called Dolores and Matilda and a buff brown who is, imaginatively, called Buffy. Buffy is a golden brown and has brave and stands up for the three of them. Dolores got the first of the inevitable bullying in the struggle for a new pecking order. Buffy, who looks more like the hybrids, faced them off right away and hasn't suffered much more than the odd pulled feather and being chased of the food which, to be fair, is probably a good thing as she's a total greedy guts.

The bees are incredibly busy and we've had our first clear, golden delicately flavoured honey and it is, as they say, nectar of the gods. Ambrosia. However, you'll be pleased to know that the regular cock-ups have continued and there is plenty of entertainment to be had. Thankfully very little of it is at the expense of the bees but they really do like to teach us a thing or two.

The one thing I have learned is that box hives really aren't the natural way for bees to live and I want more than anything to investigate hexagonal hives or if possible a top bar hive. However I'll tell you all about these when I've caught up a little with what we've been up to so far.

I'll try and separate the information so it's easier to find so there's a couple of bee updates to come, pictures of our new hens and their lovely eggs, pictures of the bees.

However my picture for today is of our beautiful and sadly missed kitten. Goose.

Love and Light

Katherine

My Parents Didn't Tell Us About Life And Death: They Gave Us Pets.

Grief

We lost Goose.

Beautiful Goose Girl.

We went away for the weekend for a family celebration and left a great friend looking after the house and she didn't come home one night. On the Monday evening we received a call from the emergency vets surgery saying a pet with a chip registered to us had been brought in.

It was Goose. Our beautiful, semi feral, climbing genius of a kitten decided to check out the territory on the other side of the road and sadly didn't make it. She was a free spirit, keeping her in was impossible and we couldn't do it.

We have buried her in the garden with Beatrice the hen and hope they are some comfort for one another in the next phase of being whatever that may be.

Meanwhile the house is strewn with little reminders and it is all terribly sad.

RIP Goose Girl.
You brought Joy by the house full.
Love and Sadness
Katherine

Sick Hen Part 3. Goodbye

Difficult Decisions.

I was due to go away for a weekend of voluntary committee work and on the Friday morning Beatrice was looking very weak indeed. Her tail feathers were sodden with urates (the chalky and amoniac substances that were still passing through her digestive tract) and she was still vomiting. I really didn't want to go but it was a commitment I couldn't avoid. Before I went I sat her on my lap in the sunshine after I'd bathed her again and she rallied somewhat. She ate a little live yogurt, accepted her medicines stoically and settled in the crook of my arm making sad, weak little chicken noises.

I was very upset because, to be honest I didn't really think she'd still be alive when I returned. But Bob promised to come back from the allotment midday to check on her and make sure she was drinking and eating. I left her swaying slightly on one leg by the water dispenser in the coop.

When I returned she was looking wobbly so we brought her in again to sleep in he box in the sitting room. The night was cold and her poor bones were barely covered by feathers as she had lost so much weight. When I came home, earlier than usual, from work she was even weaker and as I picked her up she vomited again. It became apparent that she was ravenous but every time she ate solid food she was sick and she wasn't deriving any nutrition from the food she tried to eat.

I rang Mandy at All Creatures Vetinary Surgery and she got Erica the vet to call us back. We talked a little and I told her that, subject to Erica's examination, I felt our poor little hen was dying and it wasn't kind or fair to keep squeezing antibiotics into her and tempting her with food she couldn't digest. So I sat in the sun with her until Bob came back from the allotment and tried very hard not to cry. I failed and when Bob returned we put the poor soul into the cat basket and once more took the bus to Radcliffe.

There is something surreal about taking life and death decisions when the weather is warm and the sun is shining. It feels incongruous and as we walked up the road from the bus stop with our little bundle it had an air of unreality. I should mention here that there are women who can somehow manage to cry in a sweet delicate manner, crystal tears rolling fatly down their flushed cheeks displaying their grief without unduely disturbing their makeup. I am not one of those women.

By the time we got to the surgery I looked like I'd been punched several times and the bundle of kitchen roll in my handbag was sodden. Erica took one look at me and escorted us into the examination room. We opened the cat box and Beatrice was so weak she couldn't even spread her wings. Where before she'd happily have flown across the room we had to lift her out to be examined. She had lost another 150 grams in less than a week and she continued to dribble the clear brown watery liquid from her soft crop as I held her to be examined. 

To cut a sad story short we all agreed that it was kinder to put her to sleep than to allow her to slowly starve to death and so Erica injected her with a sedative and then adiministered the lethal dose. In the end her heart was fairly strong and it took a while for her to go. The vet suggested I put her down but somehow I couldn't let her go. We took her home in the cat basket which we placed in the outside refrigerator so we could finally lay her to rest the next day.

Rest In Peace Beatrice.

Sick Hen Part 2

Big City, Little Hen.

Arriving in the leafy village of Radcliffe on Trent Bob took our Beatie to the newly opened All Creatures Vetinary Practice. The observant among you will have noticed this is not the first time I have mentioned these lovely people. I am slightly biased because they were so helpful and so accomodating. You will see why.

The practice opened its doors for the first time on Monday off last week. Beatrice was one of their first patients and as it happened the new digital X-Ray machine needed christening. Beatrice Chicken to the rescue....sort of. Our lovely hen made her presence felt by vomiting mightily on their new fixtures and fittings. I suppose when a vet takes a hen's temperature a degree of surprise is to be expected-after all a hen cannot keep a syringe in her beak. I'll leave that one to your imagination.

Her temperature was normal but on palpation Erica was unable to tell whether she was feeling lymph nodes or something more sinister. So the X-Ray became necessary. These days it isn't necessary to wait hours for films to be developed. The digital image comes up on a computer screen and the vet can see immediately if there is a problem. Erica and Mandy have kindly allowed me to show you what this looks like.

My chicken anatomy is probably not a lot better than yours but the long white things on the right are leg bones and the shorter ones at the top are her wings. The large white speckledy mass near her leg bones is not, as I feared, an impacted egg but the pro-ventriculus. This is a part of the digestive system that contains grit to help the chicken break down it's food. I'm pleased to say this is normal. However the gassy area above it? Not so much.

Glad to know she wasn't egg bound Erica gave her two injections. An antibiotic and something to stop her being sick. Being an holistic practitioner she also gave us some Aloe Vera Gel to give her to help settle her stomach and restablish normal gut flora. With which Bob put her back in her basket and got back on the bus.

Over the next couple of days we kept her in and she started to look a great deal better. She was still sleeping inside so she didn't get chilled when out of sorts but able to scratch around in the garden a bit. 

We were starting to feel hopeful again.

Sleep well. Beatrice is.

Katherine