Birds (Turkeys) and the Bees

Hi All,
In my previous posts I mentioned we had a renter in the house formally known as crack house. All is going well there. We originally thought we'd get a grad student or intern to rent the house. Since that wasn't the case we really didn't do a crack up job (pun intended) so went back and did a few improvements once our renter moved in.

There was no place to put her washer and dryer so we added a covered back porch with all the necessary hook ups. Here's what it looks like...

This past week we also moved the turkeys to their permanent home - a hoop house that Susan had in Georgia. It took us a lot longer to get it back up than it did to take it down.

The turkeys are getting big and appear to enjoy their new digs

And last but not least, we attempted to split our two bee colonies into four. It'll be a couple of weeks before we know if we were successful or not. One thing I can tell you, it's not great fun when a bee gets inside your bee suit with you.

This is what it looks like when you get stung on your eyelid

I'm going to go ice my eye some more. Take care.

Brian

New Neighbors

Hi All,
Since our last post we've gotten some new neighbors. One of them has been in the neighborhood for a few weeks. We've seen her visiting others in the neighborhood but she finally came by to introduce herself the other day.

Dulce Dos talking to Susan

She had to check out the chicken tractor

We've named her Dulce Dos after a friend's pet / tame deer Dulce. Susan and I were working on cleaning out the chicken tractor when Dulce walked up, very quietly, and nudged the back of Susan's arm with her nose. Susan liked to jump out of her skin, not knowing anyone or anything was behind her.  Dulce Dos stayed around about 30 minutes, following us around to see what we were doing. She and Duncan got along ok at first but then she seemed to be getting jealous of Duncan so she charged him once or twice to run him off. Duncan stayed clear of her after that.

Today we added two new neighbors.

Buffy has been sitting on some eggs for what we thought was two weeks, guess it's been at least three.

When we noticed Buffy sitting on eggs, she had three. While a hen sits on eggs she won't lay more eggs. Obviously when Buffy would take a break to eat or drink another hen would jump up there and lay an egg and add to the clutch. Breakfast was suffering so Susan wrote numbers on the eggs and from then on we'd take any new additions. That was after the clutch had grown to nine. Looks like they are stating to hatch.

One correction from the last post. As the turkeys have gotten bigger and their coloring has changed we've decided one of the Bronze has survived. That makes the count three Bourbon Red, three Narragansett and one Bronze.

That's it for now.
Take care.
Brian

Good News and Bad News

Good News / Bad News: Mostly Good

A little bad news to start. Shortly after our last post another of our baby turkeys died. We started off with three Bourbon Reds, three Bronze and four Narragansett. It was all three of the Bronze that died. :-(

The seven remaining turkeys moved to new temporary housing outside on Saturday. About sundown on Saturday four of them were outside the pen. We got them back in and fixed the places where we thought they got out. Sunday night before going to bed we checked on them- two were missing. Generally when they get out they stay right by the pen because they don't want to leave their flock. We looked all around and didn't find them. You know how parents worry when their kids aren't home on time. Well, they came dragging in at 6:00 this morning. I scolded them, told them to never do that again and grounded them for a week. What started out as bad news is now good news.

While I was trying to catch the two night owls and put them up I saw Duncan take off like a shot. I don't think he got the skunk but the skunk definitely got him. This was VERY BAD news. By 9:00 he's already had two baths but it doesn't seem to have helped a lot.

And finishing up with VERY GOOD news, the "crack house" is rented!  We thought we'd end up with an intern or grad student working at the Texas A&M Agri-Life Research Farm next door. But we ended up with someone even better. Our tenant (as of today) is a sweet 80 year old lady with a lot of spunk. She doesn't even mind we call it the crack house. We already like her a lot. We've made a few upgrades for her. We've put a new deck on the back of the house and today we'll start working on the roof over the deck. The deck ends about 4 feet from the property line, on the other side of the barbed wire fence are Texas A&M's cattle that are very inquisitive. They'll be checking on her anytime she's out on the deck.

That's all for now.
Take care.

Brian