Loss and learn….

Wow! Since my last post on change we have had some change that hurt….the kind of change that brought loss to the homestead.  For those of you who have animals, pets or otherwise, it is hard when things don’t go their way and they suffer.  Thankfully in this post I am not talking about the canine family members, but still….

Just so you know, you will learn more about chicken issues and bee issues in this post than you probably ever wanted or needed to.  But that is ok, because sometimes you just need some useless information to fill your day.  Who knows, maybe you could use it when playing Trivial Pursuit or when you play trivia at your favorite adult beverage establishment (kids read this, right?).

First came the chicken.  Or maybe the egg…no, actually it definitely wasn’t the egg in this situation.  Poor thing.  She was going through her molt and I think was close to the end of it.  As you know, when chickens molt they stop laying.  So, I thought it odd that she had all the symptoms of being egg bound when she wasn’t laying, but maybe, just maybe, she was done molting and starting to lay again.  Nope.  Being egg bound for a chicka is not a good thing and can lead to death.  It means she has an egg stuck inside and can’t get it out.  It causes extreme bloating and swelling so much so that her belly literally hangs to the ground and she walks like a penguin and has to use her wings to keep herself upright.  In addition, they stop eating and hardly drink.  These symptoms can also mean yolk peritonitis or ascites if in fact there is no egg in her oviduct which can also be terminal.  Egg yolk peritonitis is inflammation and infection caused by egg yolk in the abdominal cavity and ascites is the accumulation of fluid in the peritoneal cavity, causing abdominal swelling.  None of these options are fun or preventable or sometimes curable.  Without going into the gory details that are really not necessary, I made sure she didn’t have an egg stuck.I know for a fact she didn’t have an egg stuck. Really, there was no doubt.  However, in the off-chance that I was wrong (which I know I wasn’t) I also made sure the egg could get out rather easily and I hand fed her broken up tums for the calcium as that is supposed to help move the egg along.  Alas, since I knew there was no egg then and still no egg the next day, that meant ascites or egg yolk peritonitis. What did I do?  Short of taking her to the vet or draining her belly with an 18 gauge needle, I did what I could.  I made her some egg mixed with calcium (yes, I fed her eggs ok…weird, but it is the easiest way to mix liquid calcium in and get her to eat it) and I soaked her in a nice warm Epsom salt bath for about 30 minutes.  Now that is what you call a bucket of chicken!

Unfortunately, nothing helped.  She simply sat in the corners of the run holding herself up with the fence to take the pressure off her belly.  I don’t believe she made it into the house at night, either and it was a bit chilly those nights.  So, ultimately, we made the decision to put her down.  Another one bites the dust.  We are now down to 27 birds, some of which are still molting (on the tail end though..yay!).  Since we turned on the lights and they are rising and shining at 5:00 a.m. the laying has increased a bit to 8-12 eggs per day.  That’s good.  I don’t worry now about having to actually buy eggs at the store.  Phew!  How embarrassing would that be, am I right?  27 chickens and no eggs?  Say it ain’t so!  I think that should be the only time I use the term “ain’t” in a sentence.  I hope.  But you have to admit, it fits.

Then there was one.  One beehive.  I lost one of my hives.  I don’t know what I could have done differently and I sincerely believe that I did all I could have, so it makes the loss a little easier to take.  I lost my queen sometime in the last month.  I don’t really know how or exactly when, but I know I did because there was nothing happening in the hive and  too few bees as there was no queen laying any eggs.  It is normal for her to slow down laying this time of year, but she should have been doing SOMETHING.  Considering how few bees there were, I should have been able to find her if she was there (she has a big blue dot on her after all).  I waited another 10 days to make sure she really wasn’t there (just in case she was hiding and had laid a bunch of eggs that I just can’t see yet) by the appearance of larvae and/or capped brood.  If there was still nothing happening in there I was going to combine that hive with my good one.  I had also had quite a bit of robbing over the last couple of weeks which didn’t help.  If there aren’t enough bees to defend the hive, robbers will just bust their way in and eat the stores of honey in the hive and the bees in the hive will essentially kill themselves trying to defend inside the hive.  Well, I knew all was wrong when I went back because there were a ton of robber bees flying around the hive and no one defending the entrance.  I opened that sucker up and the only bees in the hive were robbers…so many of the native bees from that hive were dead on the bottom board.  The robbers had torn up at least one of the frames pretty good (that made me very sad).  The good news (always a silver lining) is that there were 5 full frames of honey in there!  I was able to take those and replace barely filled frames in the other hive so the good one has good stores now and I won’t have to worry about feeding them as much going into winter!  Yay! Yay!  Hooray!

Second silver lining, I guess is I now have lots of fully drawn frames to use next year so that is less work that new hives will have to do and they can spend their time filling those frames rather than having to build them!  Yay! Yay! Hooray!  Also, we will be moving the hives to two new locations to see if one does better than the other.  Where am I putting them?  Nope, not going to give that away just yet.  You will have to wait for the post on that in the Spring!  Don’t think you will be able to tell when I post the picture of the new hive stands, either.  I am a pretty cleaver picture taker, so I won’t give it away!  We are also going to experiment with a couple of different hives/hive components, too.  Exciting!!!  At least for me!!!

The picture on the left is a good normal drawn frame the dark area is where the brood were and the light area is where the honey was) and the one on the rights shows just how crazy those robber bees can be when they go after the stores.  You can always tell robbing before going in the hive if you see a bunch of pieces of wax on the bottom board!  I can’t really be too upset with the robbers since they were from the other hive, but they could have been a little gentler to their neighbors!  The third picture is a frame I took out of the lost hive with capped honey stores that wouldn’t fit in the other hive, so I am keeping it in the freezer until they need it!

The circle of life came into play through all of this because I was able to feed my chickens after I cleaned up the lost hive.  How?  The chickens will eat the dead bees!  So at least they got a little treat out of the tragedy.  While loss isn’t fun (usually), I have certainly been able to learn new things from these losses.  If you don’t learn from it, you weren’t really that invested in it, right?  Every single thing that happens does have a lesson and most of the time those lessons will help in the future and will make your pursuits better!  The leaves have finally begun to really change, I have actually decorated inside and out using some decorative fodder (and who doesn’t love some decorative fodder) and we are enjoying those open windows!  I hope you have a great week and keep your eyes open for new experiences and go out and learn something!