Chicks the natural way!

I love seeing animals function the way God designed them to. Today I witnessed our mama hen take her 2 day chicks out for a "nature walk" for the first time! It was one of the neatest things I have ever seen in my life.

Just under 4 weeks ago, this hen decided to accept the invitation of a bowl of eggs we had left for her to sit on. She is a year old Buff Brahma Bantam hen, and we had left an assortment of Buff Brahma Bantam and Buckeye eggs.

After 21 days, the allotted time for incubation, we saw no sign of hatching, no pipped eggs, no peeping from inside the shells. We decided to leave them for a few more days to see what would happen. Finally, on day 23, the first chick hatched, and several others were pipped. By day 24, the rest had hatched. We lost 2 chicks the second night when they weren't able to get back into the nest, so now we're left with 4 Buff Brahma Bantam chicks and 1 Buckeye!

Today they ventured outside, the bantam chicks are smaller and have a little difficulty getting around on the grass, but they soon figured it out and were dashing around pecking at this and that. Occasionally the hen would make a certain cluck and the chicks would all come running, good practice for when danger is near.

The Buckeye chick caught a moth (below), and the hen chased the chick around for a while, not really trying to take the moth away from the chick, but it seemed she was just trying to make sure that whatever the chick had was safe to eat.

Seeing such young chicks learning how to survive outside is so cool. No heat lamps, no carefully monitored temperature, lighting, and cramped quarters, just a mother hen teaching her chicks how to feed themselves, come to her for warmth when they get cool, and watch for danger.

Just the way they were made to.

Kids! Finally!

 

After 2 years of goat ownership, we finally have kids born on our farm! Lady gave birth this morning to 2 little boys, both seem to be doing well and sucking. Lady is of the Saanen breed, and she was bred to Monty, an Alpine/Nubian cross. It's too bad the kids are both male, they would have been good milkers. Lady is an excellent milker, and we plan to steal a bit of her delicious, ample milk supply for our table!

The children are excited at the kids arrival, I think we'll be spending a lot of time around the barn this spring!

Liquid Gold

Our crazy trip to Calgary at the beginning of May saw us picking up 2 packages of bees at Beemaid on our way home.  There's nothing like driving several hundred kilometers with a few thousand bees buzzing not-so-happily in the back of the vehicle!  As you can see in the photo below, they are packaged in tubes, with vented caps securely attached to each end, with the queen housed in a small box attached to a piece of webbing in the tube.

The bees overnighted in our basement, with a little sugar syrup to keep them nourished.  We got them installed into their hives in the morning.  We had established comb for them to clean up, complete with some pollen and honey.  It was early May, and while there was some pollen available for them to harvest, the only blossoms with nectar were in my greenhouse, so we put feeders on the tops of the hive and fed them a sugar syrup to give them a head start.

Checking the hives for presence of eggs, larvae, and HONEY!!

Discarded bridge comb built outside of the frames

A frame of brood, the capped brood can be seen sticking out slightly, with capped honey surrounding the young.

We harvested 2 boxes (supers) of honey at the end of July and decided to extract it in the evening after the kids were in bed at 8 pm.  We finished at about 1am, with a bit of cleanup left for the morning!  We haven't extracted honey for a few years and couldn't find our electric uncapping knife, so we used the low-tech cappings scratcher instead.  We extracted in our kitchen, strapping the extractor to the kids wooden table, which wasn't heavy enough to keep it in place so we had to lean on the extractor if the load was unbalanced.

A scratched frame of honey in the 4 frame extractor.  

The cappings scratcher left a lot more wax in the honey than the uncapping knife does, making it difficult to strain.  We had to do a lot of scraping the bottom of the strainer, slowing our progress significantly, hard to take when it's the wee hours of the morning!

This is a 70 pound honey bucket.  We harvested a total of 100 lbs of honey from the 2 boxes of honey.  As you can see, the kids furniture came in handy again!

We discovered a swarm of bees in our extra hive equipment and were able to capture it successfully.  At the end of August we harvested 5 more boxes of honey, 2 from each of the spring hives, and 1 from the captured swarm.  We extracted 2 boxes of that honey, then sickness took over our household and by the time we were well and would have been able to extract, a significant amount of the honey had crystallized in the frames which would have made it very difficult to extract.  This honey will be fed back to the bees in winter if needed or in spring to give them a head start.  

To prepare the bees for winter, we wrapped the hives with bubble wrap to protect the bees from extremes of temperature.  We're hoping for some survivors in spring!

Egg Layers!!

While getting chicks that will eventually lay eggs is exciting, it's even more rewarding to get chickens that are already laying!  We were offered a flock of 24 laying ISA Brown hens, complete with an 8x8' chicken coop, feeder and watering bucket!  The coop was loaded onto a trailer, chickens and all, and moved 4 miles to our yard.  They never skipped a beat, we continued to get between 17 and 24 eggs in the days after the move.

Some of the eggs are just huge! The one on the left is what I would call an extra large egg, the one on the right... OWWW!!



We used some 4' lawn fencing for a temporary fence, but it works so well I think it will become permanent! It doesn't need much support, and is sturdy enough to keep out the dogs and predators. It's more expensive than chicken wire, but it's doing it's job for now!

Fresh eggs are amazing. I love using eggs that are still warm!

Baby Chicks!

Early spring brought huge change on our farm!  We got baby chicks, hatched out more baby chicks, got a puppy, and picked up our cattle!  In mid-May, our first set of chicks arrived. We ordered from Performance Poultry in Ontario together with some other people on the ACE forum. They arrived in good condition and thrived on arrival. I was expecting day-old chicks, but they were probably a week old when they arrived. We ordered some heritage breeds, hardy enough to withstand our winters.

The lighter colored chick with the spot on it's head is a Buckeye.  They are a hardy bird with a pea comb that is low to it's head so it's not prone to frostbite in the winter.  They are a calm bird, dual purpose, easy to handle and are known to chase down and eat mice!  They are a rare breed, and absolutely gorgeous.

The smaller, darker chicks are a Buff Brahma Bantam.  They are also hardy, and know for their brooding and mothering abilities.  I hope to use them for hatching and raising chicks.

These chicks attacked the feed and water immediately!  Their flight from Ontario was a dry one, but they did not seem to be affected at all by the partial day of no food.  Of course it got really cold right after we got them and they lived in our basement for a week until it started getting stinky!  The kids enjoyed being able to go downstairs and watch them, we housed them in an oversized plastic storage tub with a heat lamp dangling overhead.  We had a remote temperature sensor under the lamp so we could keep an eye on the temperatures, especially when we moved them into the garage and the temps fluctuated from day to night.  We had some large wooden crates that we used to house them in the garage, and once they were fully feathered, we moved them into a chicken tractor that we built.  I'll put up pictures of the tractors in a later post!