Inspections, making room

Last weekend, I looked once more into the hives to see if the colonies were doing well. It appears that they are. While one hive has a low store of honey the second hive has seven frames full of honey. I am tempted to pull out four of those frames so we can harvest a little honey but am apprehensive about leaving the colony without sufficient stores to go through this winter. While I was working the hives, I began the process of preparing them for winter weather. Swapping to the smaller hive entrance and covering the opening of the screen bottom of the hive are two things I do each Fall. Later this month I will make a couple candy boards to help feed the bees through the cold season. We are forecast to have a cold, dry winter this year, so I will wrap the hives in an insulation blanket to help them conserve the heat required to make it through the very cold days. I will make my last bucket of syrup for them this evening.  Temperatures at the end of this week will be too cool for them to harvest the liquid feed. Bees are truly amazing creatures.

Tomorrow Mama will meet with a team from the Texas Animal Health Commission. In Texas we are required to register our flock in order to sell any of our birds at venues where the general population is in attendance. To get that registration, all of our chickens and quail will be tested. We have about fifty chickens and twelve quail in our flock, so testing may each and every bird may take a while. To accommodate that exercise the chickens will be left in the closed coops until they are selected in groups of five to be tested. Once those five show negative results, an additional five will be caught and tested. While the results are being processed the tested chickens must be caged until the negative result is posted. Once proven negative, they can be let loose and the process repeats.

The agent who will be leading the team tomorrow will have two helpers with him. All three will be equipped with nets to be used in catching the chickens. It should be fun to watch. My assumption is that all three chicken catchers have a modicum of experience in chicken wrangling, but that theory will be proved tomorrow. Mama is far less apprehensive of the whole affair since the agent has sufficient help to conduct the entire testing exercise on his own. We were expecting to have to provide all the support to a lone agent, but since that is not the case, it should require little participation on Mama’s part. We were told that the ducks are exempt from the testing. That is a huge relief. They just started laying again, so we were apprehensive about stressing them out.

I was scheduled to present an all-day class tomorrow, but my voice is still not strong enough to talk for that many hours. That class has been, once again, passed off to one of my coworkers. I am truly thankful for the help. Mama is thankful that I will be working from home when the chickens are being tested. At this point I am not sure that I need to be there, but I am happy that I will be available if needed. Most times that I am available to Mama I am needed for something or another. That’s okay. It is nice to be needed.

Trying to finish this craft container has become a challenge. It seems that every opportunity I have to set aside time to work on the container, I am drawn away to some other more urgent tasks. The latest interruption is on behalf of the goats. We have little ones that are now ready to be weaned. This means they need to be separated from their mommies. We have used the pig building in the past, but it is not properly occupied with pigs. So, I have to create a separate area to sequester the weanlings for a few weeks. We will use the garden area for the weanlings. To create three breeding areas, I have to section off two areas on the farm to allow us to use three bucks in the three separate enclosures. Each buck will have two or three does to breed. To accommodate that, I am going to split the goat barn in two and enclose one side of the paddock to have entry to the barn on the West side of the barn, while the goats that are not getting bred will have use of the East side of the barn. All of that labor for a couple months of separations.

I finished a shelter for the weanlings in the garden last night. We will begin the weaning process later this week and by the end of the month will have at least four of the nine little ones in the garden area until their mommies dry up. The shelter was built in such a way that it can be quickly disassembled and once again be repurposed. Sometime before Thanksgiving we will have sold off at least four of the goats we are now feeding. Three of the four we rescued will have had their kids by then – if, in fact, they will be having kids – and we will have the paddock for the boys back in use by our three bucks. Mama is also looking to sell one or two of our current flock to cull our herd. Right not we are keeping too many goats. How many is too many? What we have right now is too many and we will have to cull the herd to bring the feed costs back into a manageable budget. That is very hard for Mama.

By Christmas we should have everyone back to normal…whatever that is.