New girls on the block!

Hi All,
It's been a while since the last update here on the blog but it is summer (Ha flipping Ha) after all, so one doesn't spend so much time at the P.C.
So anyway, the excitement here at the moment is the arrival of the latest members of our flock of free ranging chickens. They are all of the Maran type and hopefully will give us some beautiful dark brown eggs. Click on the linkything below to see the latest pictures .
http://s252.photobucket.com/albums/hh37/postcambrian/Chickens/
Thanks for looking at our sites.
Phil.

Latest Price List

Free Range Eggs from free ranging hens……….£1.50 per half dozen
Our Copper and Cuckoo Maran Hens are laying the most beautiful dark brown eggs.

We have our own local Honey back on the shelf at £3.00 per jar.

Tote that barge, lift that bale.

Spring is rapidly approaching and the list of jobs to do here gets longer and longer by the day. A few of the most pressing things are, for instance: Get those logs cut up before the sap rises. Build more hives. Maintain the older hives. Finish that last bit of fencing. Get the veggie patches dug as soon as the land is a little drier. Clear and clean the green house. Go to work. Write up the blog. Eat, sleep and so on. Sometimes, there realy isn't enough hours in the day.
This is t'other half spreading old compost last year with the help of her little friends. At the moment it just looks like part of the lawn, so we really have to crack on and get the job done. Perhaps it will be something for the weekend. You can see some hives in the background, behind the plastic bag scarecrow.

Me, Sister, Brother and 45110

During my long lost Brother's visit to the U.K. we took a ride on my favorite standard gauge railway, the Severn Valley Railway. What a shock we all had the following day when we heared a good deal of it had been badly damaged in the summer floods. Click on the link. http://www.svr.co.uk/appeal.php

Cheeky Booger!

I've no idea how it got away with it, but this spider seemed to make a living within the hive somehow.

Harvest Time.

These are the frames that hold the honey-combs. I have loaded them into the extractor which will rotate quickly, thus throwing the honey out into the tank that surrounds it all.

That Buzzing Feeling

That Phil Needham, he's always complaining about that buzzing in his ears; all those years of loud power tools and louder rock music.

Actually it's my youngest helping to collect a swarm and finishing up with just a few on his noggin.

Happy Chickens

Our chickens seem to be happy chickens, well they are certainly quite cheeky and opportunistic, give them a grain and they'll take a bushel. Call in and see them and buy some of their lovely fresh eggs.

Expensive Hospital Trip.

Last week we travelled all the way to Cardiff as t’other half had been summoned to see the immunologist. Now ”the immunologist ” is, in this case the important phrase here. In the whole of Wales we have only one immunologist, well, this isn’t quite true, he now has a registrar but in the same place of course. What a state of affairs in this day and age, if you live in the north of Wales it means you have something like a four or five hour journey to find out why it was you nearly died after that curry or after being stung in the garden over the weekend etc. Surely we ought to have more, at the very least one more in Bangor and another in Aberystwyth. If t’other half was to take up the offer of a course to de-sensitise her to the effects of a Bee sting (ironic eh?), it would cost us hundreds if not thousands of pounds in lost work, travelling costs and accommodation. This makes the treatment for what is a potentially a life threatening condition, for us and I’m sure for most ordinary people, financially, extremely difficult. This is an area that our Assembly Members should put some money into. Yet another case of N.H.S. mismanagement? Besides the forgoing, it’s a two-year waiting list before you will get any treatment anyway, so it all becomes rather academic. On a positive note, the staff there were wonderful. They were most helpful, patient and informative. They took a great deal of time and trouble to help in every way. So many, many thanks to the immunology department at Cardiff Royal Infirmary.

Storm and Catastrophy.

The storm of Wednesday and Thursday was one of the worst we have had for a long time here and kept waking me throughout the night. The slates rattled and banged, there were branches falling from trees, various flower pots clashing and rolling around, a real cacophony. Luckily, no real damage at home but I have seen fence panels blown down and some houses have lost slates not to far away. So I thought we had got away it, but no. I received a call from t'other half at work Thursday afternoon containing bad news, two hives in an out-apiary had blown over. I'm not sure how long they had been knocked apart, but my good friend whose property the hives are on picked them up and reassembled them as best as he could as soon as he found this small catastrophe. This may sound a simple task, just picking up a few hive parts, but believe me, when you've got a several hundred VERY upset bees doing their best to defend what's left of their home, just getting near them is no mean feat! My friend was actually quite brave to do this task with no protective clothing at all. They stung me several times when went to prepare them for moving on Friday morning.
All my hives are at the home apiary now which will allow me to keep an eye on them and make winter management much easier. I will have to treat the bees for the dreaded varroa mite soon and will possibly have to feed them in the next month or so. Varroa can wipe a colony out if not managed or at best set them back markedly. Time will tell if the two upset colonies will survive. This depends on two major factors: are there enough worker bees left alive to support the colony and is the queen in good health? Many hundreds of bees have died, I know this as I have emptied out hundreds of their little corpses from the hive floors. A bee can only live for a very short time in low temperatures, maybe a minute or two. Anyway, time will tell, there's a good deal of winter left to contend with yet.
T'other half has decided to take down the Christmas decorations, so that was this evenings job for the both of us. I must say it's quite nice to be back to normal after a very good and relaxed holiday.

Yet Another New Year.

Well, here goes yet another new year. Don't the years go by faster as each year passes? They certainly do to me. My youngest son who is now nearly a teenager, has grown by several inches in height and several shoe sizes. A big event in 2007 was to meet my brother again after a gap of some fifty years, he emigrated to Canada back in the fifties (see picture).
The weather today has been very clement, so much so that the Bees have been flying all day and even collecting pollen. One bad note today though was a good pal of mine tells me he has lost six of his (Bee) colonies and now urgently has to find out why. Anyway we did a little gardening and cleaned out the chicken coup, we even found time to stack and cover logs ready for the fire as the forecast for the coming week looks to be very cold.
Back to work tomorrow after a very nice break, in fact a very lazy break and, of course back into a non-indulgence diet. I will weigh myself tomorrow to see what the damage is. I know I'll have a fright.