Winter Water Buckets

January 10, 2017 wendylee

No More Frozen Water Buckets

In 2016 I upgraded my winter water buckets to heated dog bowls for the chickens and dogs (well, more for the wild birds, since the dogs are inside a lot) and a 3 gallon heated bucket for Mara, my horse. This was a major improvement. Daily barn chores became much easier. No more ice chopping and shattered plastic buckets for me.

January 2017 has arrived, with a new division in the hen house holding 25 young Golden Comets, due to start laying in April. They were hatched October 26 (the same day my new granddaughter was born ) and the chicks have all feathered out but still have a Mama Light Bulb to get warm under. With temps in the teens, their unheated waterer has frozen every night for the past week.

This winter we also have three Mallard ducks I could not resist bringing home from the feed store last Spring. They share feed, pasture and barn space with the laying hens and our one Rooster quite well, but they make a complete mess of the communal water bowl. I have to clean and refill their water bowl twice each day. It wasn’t much of a problem when the ducks had their swimming trough outside but I put it and the water hoses away when winter hit.

I was trying to design a waterer that only the chickens could reach and was thinking of a raised platform surrounded by a perch for the chickens to jump up on. Ducks don’t seem able to jump or perch at all, so I figured it would keep them out. Then I saw a Nipple Waterer, which has little drip nozzles that the birds peck at to release the water. Both the chickens and the ducks learned how to work the foot pedaled feeder in only 2 weeks this summer so surely they can learn how to drink from drippers.

The company I purchased the electric (anti-fox) poultry fence from has this Heated Nipple Waterer and I have ordered 2 of them, one for each chicken pen. I can’t wait to set them up.

This will supply all the chickens and ducks with clean, ice free water year round. Handy things like this make me really appreciate having electricity and running water in the house and in the barn!

My ultimate goal is to figure out how to warm and power the barn using solar. I have visions of a sunken greenhouse…

-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters

Bees, Homesteading

Feeding Fall Honeybees

November 7, 2016 wendylee 2 Comments

Bees –October and November 2016

If my bees cannot learn to be at least a little self sufficient I am going to have to give them up. They have turned into a very expensive hobby when what I was looking for was a decent supply of honey. Sure, I want to help pollinators and any plants that need bees to reproduce, but this is ridiculous.

The Russian Queen I installed September 20^th in hive #3 is laying well, with lots of capped brood.

Hive #2 was treated for mites with the Apivar strips on the 29^th and I drenched the ground for beetle larvae with the Permithrin again. I removed all the bottom screens with the beetle trap trays when larvae stopped showing up in them. Cold weather is coming and I don’t want them drafty.

Feeding Fall Honeybees

All the hives have gotten way too light, as if the bees are eating more honey than they are storing, which is scary going into fall and cold weather. Lots of empty combs all of a sudden, so October 6^th I started feeding the 1:1 syrup again. I had removed the top syrup feeders Aug 16^th when all the hives seemed full. I Fed them syrup again on October 11^th.

On October 28th, another beekeeper came by to help me look at my hives and we went through all six of them, finding two of them with very little brood, one with no brood at all and all of them still way to light in honey. I went and talked with Ed for advice and he suggested feeding them 2:1 syrup and combining two of the hives, using a double screen he lent me, then re-queening the third hive and eventually combining all three, so they have a better chance of making it through the winter.

When I got back home with the replacement queen, and went through them again, they seemed stronger than I remembered, with more brood than I realized at first. So I re-queened the one with no brood (#4) and started heating water to make the heavy syrup.

2:1 Mix

One pot with 12 lbs water (1 ½ gallons) + 24 lbs sugar (6 x 4 lb bags)

One pot with 16 lbs water (2 gallons) + 32 lbs sugar (8 x 4 lb bags)

Note: It dawned on me that I had no idea why lb is the abbreviation for pounds so I Googled it.

{Lb is an abbreviation of the Latin word libra. The primary meaning of libra was balance or scales (as in the astrological sign), but it also stood for the ancient Roman unit of measure libra pondo, meaning “a pound by weight.”}

Once I added double the sugar, the mixture no longer fit in my two largest pots, so I had to ladle half of it out into a five gallon bucket before mixing it all up. Such a heavy concentration of sugar does not dissolve as easily as the 1:1 mix so it was hard to not make a sticky mess all over the kitchen while briskly stirring it all up and then pouring it all into eight one gallon jugs to cool. What a pain.

I fed them every 2-3 days for four feedings and the bees filled their empty honey frames back up. Wouldn’t you think they could find food on their own? I am starting to think that there is just not enough natural forage around here for bees to make it. Corn, soybeans and grass occupy most of the open spaces near here and they do not provide much nectar. (Click on the green link for a list of nectar producing plants.) Maybe I should move them to a wilder area with less farmland, but then it would be harder to find the time to check on them, and bears would be more of an issue. Here, at least I can see them and they are behind a woven wire fence.

The Queen

A week after re-queening, on October 22^nd, I went in to remove the cage and found the new queen still inside, with a bunch of other bees. She had not moved into the hive. Bizarre. So, I pried the screen off to let her out and before I could stop her, she flew away! Geesh.

I called Ed again.

“Will she come back?”

He laughed.

“Nope. You’d better come get another one.”

I jumped in my car and headed over to Back Creek and Geezer Ridge. Since she had not ever started laying, he replaced her free of charge, luckily. I came back and installed her.

I waited too long for a warm, non windy day to open the hives back up again and check on her. It was 2 weeks, on November 6^th, when I checked all the hives for brood again. I went through and fed them some regular 1:1 syrup mix and gave them each half a pollen patty.

When I got to hive #4 I pulled out the queen cage only to find that, not only was she still in there, the bees had not even chewed through the candy plug to let her out! I should have checked sooner, I know. They can feed her through the screen and she still looked OK, so I carefully released her into the bottom hive and quick covered it back up so she would not fly out.

I do not have high hopes. Talk about discouraged. I am seriously thinking that if I can just get them to somehow make it through winter and pay me back in the spring through selling splits that I might get back out of this bee thing. I have about had it.

-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods Gardens and Critters

Hiking

Spruce Knob West Virginia

October 11, 2016 wendylee 1 Comment

For our 24th wedding anniversary we stuck with tradition and headed out to the mountains and Spruce Knob, the highest point in West Virginia. We have a cabin not too far away in the same county of Pendleton and stayed there for the long Columbus Day weekend.

The weather started out dreary, drizzly and cold and we were glad to warm up by our wood stove and the first fire of the season. A hurricane was pounding the southern states with rain and wind and we were glad to have it only bring a few heavy showers our way.

By Sunday, the skies were clear and blue with a cold, brisk wind blowing any lingering thoughts of summer far away. It was definitely Fall with all the rich smells and colors to go with it. October is such a beautiful month in the mountains.

We drove out past Franklin on Route 33 west and stopped at the Germany Valley Overlook, which is pretty no matter what time of year it is.

The road to the top of the mountain is paved these days, which has made it less of a dusty chore than it used to be. It is still narrow though, and we had to pull way to the edge to let those coming down pass by. Every now and then we glimpsed a flash of color, from a Sugar Maple or a tree harboring a bright red Virginia Creeper vine.

We drove on by the turn to the top and made our way over to Spruce Knob Lake to see how much color might be there.

It was gorgeous and the trees were further along than they had been in the valley below. It was so cold and windy that I needed to put my ear warmers and fleece on as soon as we got out of the car. We did not stay long because we wanted to get a hike in and had gotten a late start.

Backtracking towards the trail head we stopped at the campground to check it out, just because we never had . There are 42 primitive campsites-with outhouses, picnic tables and fire rings- on a one way loop in the woods. No views but still nice looking, fairly private sites.

There were only a couple of cars parked at the Allegheny trail head as we loaded our day packs and adjusted our boots.

We had hopes of finding some good views from the main Allegheny Ridge trail but were disappointed in that, and also because the gated trail had been recently traveled on by some huge vehicle that left mud and water filled ruts. It was difficult to get around some of the deep mud and I had it go over the top of my boots at one point. We decided to leave the main trail and take a side shoot instead, turning onto North Prong Trail and following it down into a quiet open valley.

Crossing the shallow creek numerous times, the trail became almost to narrow to find, through high summer weeds and amazingly thornless brambles. We eventually came out to an intersection with the Gandy Run Trail and followed that back towards our starting place. We saw hardly any wildlife and only two people the whole 3 1/2 hours we spent on the trail. Still, it was a beautiful day and much warmer and less windy down on the lower trails.

We got back in the car and drove up to the Spruce Knob viewing platform, the highest point in the state.

It was only 42 degrees F and the wind was blowing, as it always is up this high. Looking out from the top of the platform there is nothing but mountains and more mountains as far as you can see.

The Spruce trees sound like the ocean as the wind blows through them. Sometime, I hope to be up here to watch the sun set. Not today though.

Fall color is just starting and should be gorgeous in another week.

You can catch a tiny glimpse of the lake in the top left of this zoomed photo and the most color we have seen all day.

On the way down the mountain, we stopped for another great view to the East.It is always invigorating to experience Spruce Knob and we had another good day.

Back to our little cabin for dinner and warmth by the woodstove.

-wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters

Homesteading

Rolling Firewood Carts

October 1, 2016 wendylee 2 Comments

The Woodshed

We have a great woodshed built onto our house. It has a concrete floor and forms an “L” between the porch and the garage. In the winter we can go out through the mudroom onto the porch in our slippers and get dry wood without any hassle. Talk about living it up. The only issue we have had is that any wood leftover from the year before ends up in the back of the freshly split wood unless we re-stack it all. I hate to move firewood more than I have to so I have finally come up with a solution.

Dollies

I had been down at the Tractor Supply getting feed when I saw a moving dolly advertised for $13.99. It has four pivoting wheels, measures 18 x 30 inches and has a 1000 pound capacity. The wheels alone would have cost more than $5 each and the next one closest to it cost $45. Initially, I bought one just because it looked so useful and had figured I would stack my bee hive pieces on it in the garage.

Then Jeff started splitting all the wood he has cut and piled up this year from our self thinning woodlot and it became apparent that we needed to stack a whole lot of wood very soon. His electric log splitter really speeds up this process- and it is quiet. Still, we wanted the dry wood from last year out front. Then the rolling firewood stack idea came into my head.

This is my kind of project. I love drilling and bolting things together and making something useful. I drew up a basic plan for materials and headed to Tractor supply in hopes of getting nine more moving dollys. They had only one left but told me a store about 15 miles away had eight more, so there I went. Then I stopped at the Home depot for two by fours and lag bolts, nuts and washers.

Lucky for me, we finally managed to get a few rainy, dreary days so I could work in the garage. Over the next couple of days I built ten, pretty darn square, wooden frames measuring four feet wide, five feet tall and sixteen inches wide to sit on the blue rolling dollies.

Then I attached the frames to the dollies with lag screws for added stability. They roll easily and seem quite sturdy plus there are no sharp edges because I recessed all the corner bolts using a paddle bit.

Next, we load them up with firewood and take them for a test drive.

Jeff filled the first one and rolled it to the side out of the way while we cleaned up the woodshed and dismantled the old racks. It rolls well and does not wobble at all. Very sturdy.

Seven and a half rolling firewood carts filled so far. This is getting exciting. And so clean out there now. This might be one of my better ideas.

-Wendy lee, writing at edgewisewoods, gardens and critters

EdgewiseWoods, Gardens and Critters

Winter Water Buckets

No More Frozen Water Buckets

Like this:

Feeding Fall Honeybees

Bees –October and November 2016