Uncllys Blog

Monday, 11 May 2009

The Uncllys Party - May 9th 2009

Lots of fun at the party for loads of families

Thursday, 7 May 2009

Bee swarm collected

Here's the bees on the barn being collected - you can see the ball of bees. They are being gently encouraged up into the cardboard box and they'll then be taken to a new hive.

The beekeepers told us that in the next couple of days a new queen will hatch in the old hive and then start laying 2,000 eggs a day to produce new bees. Apparently up to 1,500 bees a day will die so its all quite an amazing process and we were privileged yesterday to have the opportunity to see this swarming in action.

Bees swarm

Here is the inside of the hive that is located in one of our orchards. You can see the additional wax that the bees have made as they run out of space in the frames.

When the hive gets overcrowded - which it did yesterday - then the bees swarm. The queen and about 20,000 bees left the hive and started hovering above the barn finally settling on a corner and forming a great ball about 12ft up.

We contacted local beekeepers to see if they wanted to come and collect the swarm. A couple of hours later they were here and getting the bees into a box to take to a new hive.

New chickens arrive

Thanks to Tim Lewis, we now have 26 new hens 'at point of lay' - which usually means we'll have to wait 2 or 3 weeks for them to get going.

They arrived in the dark last Monday evening and were very drowsy (and so easy to handle) and put into the hen houses.

They are getting used to the outdoors and scratching around for grubs etc. But they find it hard remembering to go back into the hen house at night - last night we found 4 of them up in the leylandii to roost - at least out of the way of the fox.

We lost 7 lovely hens to the fox last week - he got in and killed them all. Didn't even bother eating much!

So hopefully in the next few weeks we'll be having a good regular supply of free range eggs again.