Of Bees and an Old Joke

Just as well I've been pushing myself to do the painting these last few days, as I woke up this morning to pouring rain, I had to put my raincoat over my pyjamas to go let the chickens out. Despite the rain they came shooting out of their house as if they hadn't eaten for a month. Of course, since having to re-roof the run to keep the fox out , they now have an area to go in that is under cover although today’s rain was still coming in through the chicken wire sides of the run. None of the chickens are laying at the moment which is a bit depressing, the two chicks are still too young, although the Orpington has grown huge, the three ex batts have been putting all their energy into growing their feathers back and do look almost respectable now, Mary and Amelia have no excuse. Last year Amelia stopped laying in the autumn and didn't start again until January so I may have to resign myself to having to buy eggs for a while.

The quail are no better as regards laying and really it is time I moved their cages into the garage for the winter as they are not as hardy as the chickens. Oliver and I may go to sort out a space for them later. At the moment we are sitting comfortably on the sofa playing Ceebeebies games on one laptop, whilst I try and write this on another.

Yesterday, as soon as I’d dropped Oliver off at nursery I was out in the garden. First, I did the long overdue task of sorting the bees out for winter, feeding the hives that seemed light and removing any supers that didn't have any stores in them. If there were any supers with honey in, then I swapped them over so that they are now under the brood boxes instead of on top. On two of the hives I reduced the size of the entrances by putting a wooden block in place. I only seemed to have two of these though so I will have to buy another three and also buy more of the metal mouse guards which are pinned into place to stop mice raiding the honey during the winter. It is also time to treat the hives against varroa and then, after that, I can safely leave them alone for a while. I was encouraged at how healthy the hives were looking, all five hives were stronger than any of  the hives I had last year. I could also see bees coming in with their backs coated in white pollen which is a sign that they have been visiting Himalayan balsam, an invasive foreign plant which is much disliked by everyone except beekeepers who appreciate the pollen it can provide late in the season. It is good to know that my bees are within flying range of Himalayan balsam just as it is good to know they can access alder catkins in February for an early start to their season. Next year my challenge with the bees is to try to pre-empt swarming. Although it was good experience, handling this years swarms, and has allowed me to build up to five hives, to get a good honey harvest, the bees really need to be  able to concentrate on bringing the nectar in rather than building up a new colony after swarming.

Inevitably, inspecting the bees took longer than I thought, and it was nearly five by the time I’d finished putting everything away but as Oliver was spending the night with his other grandparents, I didn't have to collect him from nursery so I was able to zip out into the front garden and do a little more in my mission to obliterate the orange paint. Yesterday was the turn of the drainpipe,

which copying all the neighbours I painted black.

 As the drainpipe is next to my neighbours front door, it put me in mind of the pun I once heard on ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’, ‘Was it you who spilt black paint outside the front door? Well go and never darken my doorstep again!’.

Fox Alert !

On Monday I didn't want to get out of bed, it was warm, I was sleepy so it was half past seven before I was trekking across the road in my dressing gown to let my chickens out (one of the many peculiarities of my street is that the gardens are across the road from the house). I was stopped in my tracks however by the sight of a fox and chicken dodging round a car not 6 ft apart from each other. I chased the fox away and the chicken disappeared up the street. Feeling responsible I knocked up two of the neighbours but neither claimed ownership.
So I carried on seeing to my chickens, until I  heard a chicken commotion from two gardens away. Clearly the fox had come back.Like the cavalry coming to save the day, I was in time to scare the fox into dropping the chicken that was in his mouth, and make him run away. There was a scattering of feathers all over the garden, but no bodies thank goodness. The chicken that had been in the fox's mouth was surprisingly perky, but I picked her up and shut her in an empty hen house along with another one and one that seemed very traumatised. I fetched them food and water but by then the traumatised one was stretched out on her side looking as if death was imminent and she did indeed die during the morning. During the day however 4 other chickens came out of hiding. Still Kevin's flock which had been in the region of 12-15 birds was down to 6.
As a result, all the chicken keepers in the street, decided to keep their birds shut up in their runs for the day instead of giving them the run of the garden as they usually do.This morning however, even that precaution wasn't enough, as the fox managed to leap to the top of Nicky's 7ft fence and then find a weak spot in the netting and actually get into her chicken run. Fortunately he was spotted before he had time to do more than terrify them. Her two new chickens, who were actually bleeding, have been put into secure confinement for the day, whilst her other three chickens have sought refuge in my run.
I tried to take a photo of them, but they seem to be in shock and are spending their time huddled under the floor of the hen house.

But whilst I was taking photos I thought you might like to see pictures of the chicks who are getting on for 10  weeks old now. Here is the Orpington who is now the size of a bantam,

 And this is the Brahma who has the most ridiculous feathery legs and seems to be a bit of a slower developer than the Orpington.

Note I haven't given them names yet, I am really hoping that they are both female so that we can keep them. So far so good.
The ex battery hens are also looking much better.

One of them in particular had a bright red bald bottom when she arrived rather like a gibbon (or is it baboon?) but is now beginning to get a decent covering of feathers.

 However, I don't think that my run is adequately fox proof. I partially roofed it last year, but the pvc panels gave way under the winter's snow and the rest of the roof is just netting, more aimed at keeping chickens in than foxes out. Sorting out the chicken run roof, was on my list of jobs to do before winter, so I don't mind that it has moved sharply up the priority list. I am going to strengthen it with more wood and then half of it will be pvc, to give the girls protection from the rain and snow of winter, and the other half will be covered in chicken wire. One of my chicken keeping neighbours has offered to pick me up 4 pieces of 8ft long timber when he goes to buy his own chicken run strengthening wood. Until that arrives, I thought I should cut back some of the forsythia which hangs over the run. I set out with the secateurs and cut enthusiastically,until I realised that the pile of branches was so large I had trapped myself into a corner.

Hmm.
Not to worry , we jungle veterans know that the only thing to do in these circumstances, is to cut a alternative path out, which I did.
Having done this immense pile of pruning (which is by no means finished)

is no bad thing as it will make it much easier to get that corner of the garden under control next spring. So it is an ill wind as they say.
Still I was glad when it started raining and I could honourably retreat inside to a cup of tea and the computer.

As promised, a Chicken and Quail Special!

As I said yesterday there has been much going on here poultry wise over the last month. Having to keep all the occupants safe and happy has at times been rather a juggling act. I bought a secondhand rabbit hutch to get Tim, the quail with the deformed foot, away from Goldie the other male quail as they were fighting, but then I was forced to use this second hutch as a broody coop for Amelia Chicken,

and bring Tim back into the large plastic crate in the house we had used when the quail were chicks.
This was far from ideal as he would kick over his food and then spill his water and then his droppings would become mixed in the soggy mess and the whole thing would quickly start to smell. I learnt afterwards from those up in Feng Sui that I had placed this malodorous box in the wealth corner of my house. Possibly why wealth has been fleeing from me recently.

 Once the chicks were hatched, I started moving them during the day into a special enclosure I had put together on the lawn, from chicken wire and a beach shelter, which meant Tim could go out into their hutch during the day making it easier to keep the crate clean. Solving the problem entirely, I bought a large rabbit hutch on ebay for a tenner, the type with living quarters upstairs and a hole in the floor leading to a downstairs run. I totally failed to appreciate however, that the hutch which was 4 ft high by 4 ft long would not go in my car. Now my car, is a 7 seater people carrier, and with the seats down will easily take the 6 ft tables I use for the shows, so I never expected trouble with a rabbit hutch, but  I think the maximum height and width of the car was 110 cm and we needed 120. The seller offered to cut it in half and remove most of the base. I agreed thinking it wouldn't take long with a jigsaw and then watched in embarrassment as he laboured with a handsaw  for forty minutes on one of the hottest days of the year. After 25 minutes it occurred to me that I could arrange to come back another day and bring my own jigsaw, but I didn't feel I could mention that after he had struggled so long. Eventually, thank god, he succeeded and we hefted it into the car. The following day all I had to do was cut a piece of wood to size (using a jigsaw) to fill in the hole in the floor and Tim was in a home of his own. He still needs company, and more females are also needed in the hutch across the way, where Una has suffered from being the sole recipient of Goldie's lust ( the back of her neck is beginning to look quite bald). But she is laying.
Here is a picture of one of her eggs compared to one of Mary's.

And this is what poached quail eggs on toast look like. They cook in about a minute, incredibly quickly, I think I will need a bit of practice before I can make the perfect poached quail's egg.

As I said before, the chicks hatched during the Great Yorkshire Show. I had ordered 6 mixed breed eggs from ebay and they sent me 3 Orpingtons and 3 Brahmas and one of each hatched. I will probably get a better hatch rate next year, as I have learnt several things about the brooding business. One is to get the hen settled on the nest before introducing the eggs. Amelia had gone broody and was sitting tight on the nest box but when the eggs arrived I moved her and them into a broody coop, so then when I encouraged her off the eggs every morning for her to eat , drink and exercise she would forget and return to the nest box instead of the broody coop, making me worry about the eggs getting chilled. But it was lovely to hear cheeping from inside an egg a couple of days before the due date and even lovelier to see the little hatchling and then a pleasant surprise to see another, the day after. I had wanted Orpingtons, because my friend has one, and it is a lovely plump cuddly hen who finds flying difficult. Brahmas are also large fat placid hens but when I had looked in my chicken breed book I had been put off by them having feathered legs which I thought would get dirty easily.
The Brahma chick however emerged with the cutest fluffy trousers

Both chicks are excessively cute and Amelia is a very good mother looking after them like well a mother hen,

 She clucks constantly near them and they cheep back so that they always know where each other is. They are approaching 4 weeks now and are a little taller and have developed real feathers on their wings and can even fly short distances but are still very much in need of Amelia's protection. Chickens normally start laying when they are about 5 months old, sometimes later in pure breeds and as they don't lay much in winter I am not expecting the chicks to lay until next spring (assuming they are female of course).

Amelia has not laid since she went broody and I don't expect her to whilst she is looking after the chicks, which left me with the prospect of just one laying chicken for months ahead. I needed more. Mary was in any case lonely, she didn't like the hen house by herself and had started hanging out with next door's chickens and putting herself to bed with them. I investigated the website of  The British Hen Welfare Trust and discovered that they were taking a delivery of ex battery hens that would otherwise be slaughtered in a weeks time so I put my name down for three. These deliveries are to a volunteer co-ordinators farm and as she has her own life to live all the chickens must go the same day they arrive. This takes some organisation and we were all given time slots to turn up in. I arrived with two sturdy cardboard boxes, paid a £10 donation and was given three bedraggled hens to take home.

 When bored hens will peck at each other's feathers as a result all three are very scarce on wing feathers, two have bare bottoms making them look distressingly like oven ready chickens in a supermarket and one poor chicken is in addition lacking a tail.

I lifted them into the chicken house with Mary (the plump, healthy almost white one in the picture above) and left them to get acquainted overnight. The next day I opened the hatch but left it up to them if they came out or not. By mid afternoon the bravest who is also the most feathered was outside. I have named her Briony after Sir Brian in the poem who was as bold as a lion. Slowly and uncertainly the others followed and then it was such a joy to watch them behaving like chickens for the first time in their lives, scratching the ground and snatching at bits of leaf and grass.
I was warned that sometimes the shock of the change can be too much for them and they can die unexpectedly within a short time I will just see how things go. I did have a scare during the week when I thought I might have broken Briony's leg. Being as bold as a lion she was reluctant to go to bed one night. Now it was 9.30 and getting dark and raining and I wasn't at all reluctant to turn in but Briony was resisting all persuasion and so I ended up chasing her round and round the house 3 or 4 times (she is surprisingly nippy for a supposed convalescent) until I had her pinned against the wire netting which enabled me to grab her firmly and shove her into the house. The next morning as she came out, I saw her leg give way under her, and realised that she could put no weight on it. Guiltily, I rushed inside, and read on the internet about making splints from lolly sticks and keeping the bird isolated, (didn't want this I'd only just got the quail out of the house) but when I went to inspect her she was feeding and managing to get herself around and by teatime she was using the leg although limping so I was much relieved to downgrade the injury to a sprain.
The ex batts have been here a week now, and every day I scrutinise them for signs of improvement. I have read that new feathers take a couple of months so we will have to live with there awful appearance for a while yet. Their eyes are looking brighter though and I think their combs are redder. Unbelievably they are still laying, at least 1 or 2 a day between them. They don't understand what nest boxes are for so I am keeping a sharp eye out in the run. One of the first eggs was very thin skinned with a network of very fine cracks at one end but they seem to be normal now. We also noticed that despite being freshly laid they didn't poach as well as our own eggs, the white didn't hold together as well. I have no idea why this might be.

There you are then, fully updated on all the poultry happenings here. The next things will be finding more female quails, watching the ex batts recover and finding out what sex the chicks are but I will try to keep you informed.

A Brief (Ha Ha) Update

Good Morning All !
I realise that it is several weeks since I wrote, and that fact has been languishing on my conscience and featuring daily on my to do list (or facienda) for at least the last week. The trouble is that the longer I left it the more there is to write about and the bigger the task appears. I think I shall just have to write an overview today and then write several more in-depth blogs. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for heavy rain, a perfect day for sitting at a computer.

Firstly the soapy business, the Great Yorkshire Show was very hot and very busy and a little like an endurance test, I was there from 7.30 am to 7.30 pm being pleasant and chatty and basically saying the same thing over and over again 'It's all made from beeswax, an amazing natural moisturiser. I am a beekeeper you know' By the end of the day I was sick of the sound of my own voice and pitied my poor neighbours. Like at Bramham I met an amazing bunch of entrepreneurial women and in quiet periods the marquee was almost like a study group or tutorial. The key topic of discussion was Twitter, some were old hands, some just starting (ie me - @Gilliganwood feel free to add me if you are that way inclined) and some were complete novices.  Whilst on the subject of e-marketing my website  www.gilliganwood.com is now open for business. I won't say the website is complete, the pages on the benefits of beeswax are looking very bare and the 'What we've been doing' page is also in need of updating (another candidate for a wet Monday) but should anyone have an urgent need for a beeswax based skin balm they can now buy online.

Secondly the poultry, so much has happened here that they will definitely need a post devoted to them. Una the quail has started laying! She now lives in a hutch with Goldie, Tim being separated, in another hutch, both hutches in urgent need of more females. I saved up Una's eggs and made mini scotch eggs for us to take on a beach picnic. They were very cute and had the huge advantage of not having as much egg as a normal scotch egg. Amelia turned broody so I bought in some fertilised eggs and let her sit on them. She (or I) timed the whole thing really badly as they were due to hatch in the middle of the Great Yorkshire Show, which led me to refuse the opportunity of going for a drink with the words 'No, I must rush home, my eggs are about to hatch', the ladies eyed my dubiously and agreed that they mustn't hinder me. Two out of the five eggs hatched, a black Orpington and a Brahma. If that isn't enough poultry excitement, last Sunday I collected three ex battery hens and brought them home to recuperate and provide me with eggs. More about all of them plus photos, tomorrow.

The bees, also have kept me busy, partly this was my fault as being occupied with the business I left them to their own devices, which inevitably led to swarms. One of the swarms decided to settle at the top of the hawthorn tree that I didn't prune last winter. Remembering how I felt when I was pruning in the winter I asked my neighbour, Dave who is a climber for help. He involved his son, Kris and then in the way of our street, my other neighbour, Nicky came out to offer advice and ended up filming it all on her mobile phone. If possible I shall put this too on the blog in days to come. The next step I have to tackle in beekeeping is harvesting the honey. Last year the weather was so bad that there wasn't any honey to harvest but this year I have at least one full super, undoubtedly there would have been more if I hadn't let them swarm. Although there are ways of extracting honey without using an extractor, my plan is to put my name down to borrow one from the Leeds BBKA.

I'm afraid I have neglected the garden a bit this summer, all the hopes I had for growing my own veg didn't really happen. I have a few potatoes and carrots, a handful of tomatoes and one courgette. There are some onions in the plot but I have neglected them so much that I don't know how they are doing. It has been a reasonable year for fruit though, I picked a pound of red currants and added it to a pound of rhubarb I'd stashed in the freezer earlier and two pounds of bought strawberries and made a surprisingly tasty jam. The gooseberries have reached their peak of ripeness this weekend. I have been watching them carefully as I adore gooseberries that are ripe enough to be sweet whilst still keeping their crunch. I think the only way to achieve this gooseberry perfection is to grow them yourself. Promisingly there are berries on the cranberry bush this year that are looking pretty big, although still green. Hopefully there will be enough for home grown cranberry sauce at Christmas.

There has been work done on the house, as I am totally fed up with how bad my internet connection is and I am going to seek a new provider. However, I have suspicions that although the loss of internet for 12 hours at a time, is the fault of the provider, the extreme slowness of the system is probably down to my wiring. If I am going to let a telephone engineer into my bedroom to sort this out, then I would rather that he did not have to pick his way over sewing machines, spare computers, soap ingredients, wool, clothes and everything thing else that has found a home on my bedroom floor. This tied in nicely with the Mortgage Free in Three's challenge to chuck 100 things in 10 days http://mortgagefreeinthree.com/forum/the-100-things-in-10-days-challenge/  After several days work I can now see vast expanses of floor, I reckon by next weekend I should have it all in shape. Rosie is also busy throwing things out as she is moving into a flat for part of the week from September and is in the process of reassessing her belongings in a what to take, what to leave and I wouldn't wear that again if you paid me mode. So far she has managed three bin bags of clothes to charity shops and several bin bags of rubbish. I think I will write more about Rosie's flat in future if she will let me as it is going to be an interesting challenge to take a  basement  student flat furnished with basic necessities and turn it into something homely and creative on next to nothing. Her eldest sister Maddie has already crocheted a blanket for her. Incidentally since I showed the WIRE ladies, some blue genitalia that Maddie had knitted for a friend, she was ever after referred to as 'your daughter, the obscene knitter'.

Finally on the health front I remember mentioning in January that I needed to drop a size by summer so that I could fit into a wetsuit I'd bought in the sale. Frankly this never happened and by Bramham I had mysteriously gone up a size! I don't know how that happens, I take my eye off things and the weight just rushes on. So I have finally started dieting again and since Bramham have lost a stone. I don't want to say too much about this though, as other people's diets are not interesting. I will just say that having worked in an office where people were always counting points or on red days or green days or having complicated regimes where they couldn't mix carbohydrates and proteins, I am simply cutting back on my food. I do realise however that on a limited intake every calorie has to pull its weight so I am trying to go for healthy foods high in vitamins and minerals.

Phew! I think that is the end of the update. I bet you're glad I went for the brief version with no pictures or involved stories. I will save those for the next few days.

Where did the time go?

Somehow life has got frantically busy.
I have my first show on Saturday which is the Otley Show. It is so I hear a good show, about 40 minutes away, busy and popular without being scary like the Great Yorkshire Show. Preparations were going okay. Well to be truthful I had a mental block in my head that said 'I can't do anything until I get the labels sorted out'. Then last week someone asked for samples saying they would call round the following night, I said that would be fine and then spent the next day sweating over the label design and totally forgot about what prices to quote her. I then spent the next morning writing up a price list in a three fold little brochure. This is good as it will be going out on the stall at Otley.
Having finished the label design all I had to do now was order the rest of the labels and buy a laser printer which I did on Monday. My internet was down again so I had to do this from the library. The printer is due to arrive today, the labels, I don't know when, sincerely hope it is before Friday.
So my list of things to do for the show was to finish fiddling with the labels to make sure they print out aligned  properly, to cut and label the soap, to make and label the balms and body butters and to check the set up for the stall, tablecloth, lighting, display etc. It seemed a full programme but manageable but then this happened:

That is a sealed queen cell and means that unless I do something quickly, a swarm is imminent. I took advantage of a small burst of sunny weather to do a quick inspection yesterday and found that in hive 2. You should be impressed that I managed to take a picture as punching a security code into a touch screen phone whilst wearing leather gloves is not easy. Nor is holding the frame in one hand, the phone in another and somehow managing to press the shutter button again in leather gloves. I didn't want to take the gloves off as the bees weren't happy and there were a lot buzzing round and crawling on me.
Now I have to do something fairly quickly here, I have two options (three if you include doing nothing and then possibly watching a swarm flying away), making up an artificial swarm in a separate box to the side of the hive or following the Demaree method and separating the queen cells and most of the brood from the queen by putting them in separate boxes within the same hive.
I like the Demaree method, it has the advantage of not splitting the colony and letting the flying bees work away as usual whilst the new queen hatches and is mated and starts laying. Also if I have read things wrong and these are not swarm cells but supersedure cells where the colony has decided to replace a poor queen then I haven't lost anything as the colony is still basically intact. I have two problems, the Demaree method calls for a brood box with the old queen in it topped by a queen excluder, then a super, then a Demaree board and then another brood box with the queen cells in. I don't have a Demaree board, which is like a queen excluder but with a hole cut out of the side to allow the new queen to leave the hive and mate. I could probably get by with using a spare queen excluder for the next few days but I haven't got one of them either although I can buy one tonight at the LBKA meeting. My other problem is that I have not yet seen the queen in this hive.
I don't have much time to decide what to do, if they haven't swarmed already the bees will swarm between 10 and 4 on the next fine day. Fortunately it is due to rain until 3 today so I can probably risk leaving it until tomorrow morning when Oliver is at nursery.
Meanwhile the the two male quails are practically fully grown now and need to be out of the brooder box. I have been bidding on ebay for the last two weeks for an old rabbit hutch which could be converted for quail. I was finally successful on Monday getting one for £19 which I picked up yesterday. I could do with getting it out of the back of the car, cleaned out and put inside somewhere to let the quail acclimatise to life without the heat lamp before transferring it to the hen coop. This may not happen before Sunday as I have to prioritise the Otley Show and the swarm.
Finally Mary laid her second egg yesterday (I think). She still doesn't know what a nestbox is for and laid it in a heap of dust.

Bees, Bees, Bees

It has been a mainly bee filled week. Two years ago when I started out with chickens and bees, I worried about them both. I worried about their accommodation, what they would eat, if they would get diseases, if they would get out and if anything would get in. I long since gave up worrying about the chickens, I let them out, make sure there is food and water and then shut them up at night, one of them lays a regular egg and that is it. I have lost three birds in those two years which has made me sad, but really I barely have to think about the chickens any more. The bees on the other hand seem to be a non stop source of anxiety. In winter I worry about whether they are surviving, in summer it is whether they are going to swarm or not followed by whether they are building up enough stores to last them through the winter. Almost all the year round I am worrying about whether to treat for varroa.
For beekeepers this spring who were congratulating themselves that their bees had at least made it through the winter alive (and I heard  last week of a Yorkshire beekeeper who lost 80 out of 100 colonies), a new worry was raised at the BBKA Spring Convention with the thought that as last summer was so wet, virgin queens had very little chance to get out of the hive to mate and if they don't mate within two to three weeks they will start laying unfertilized eggs which will become drones and thus mean the death of the colony. Fortunately my three virgin queens all seem to have mated.

I had several spring tasks I wanted to do with the bees, I wanted to repair or replace the floor of hive 1 which was coming apart and letting bees in through the back of the hive, I wanted to coax hive 2 out of their old brood box and into a new brood box and onto new foundation to try and stop them building brace comb between the frames and I wanted to change the brood box of hive 3, as I realised that it had not been built wrong as I had assumed but that I had put it together wrong.
I started with hive 3 last Tuesday. I had a bit of a shock. In March when we were forecast snow, the BBKA sent a warning round to feed the bees to prevent late starvation. Hives 1 and 2 still had candy left from the winter but hive 3 had taken it all so I put more on in an upturned plastic pot. By last week they had not only eaten it all but they had filled the pot with comb and the queen had been laying in it. I wish I had taken a picture of it to show you as the natural build of the comb was beautiful but I had a pot full of bees most likely including the precious queen and it was not as warm as it should be for inspecting bees so I had to act quickly. This is the pot and some of the comb after it was broken up.

 The bees would not simply shake out of the pot back into the hive but clung on to the comb. I started digging bits of the comb out and putting them on a spare hive floor. The bees did not like this but gradually by removing comb and shaking bees I got the pot emptied and the majority of the bees back in the hive. I put a queen excluder on the brood chamber and a super filled with foundation above that. Then I retreated to let everyone calm down, hoping to God that I had got the queen on the right side of the queen excluder and hoping even more fervently that I hadn't dropped or killed her in the melee.The queen excluder by the way is to stop the queen laying eggs in the super, thus if all goes well, you can extract honey from the super without the risk of finding eggs or larvae in it.
Examining the exposed larvae revealed the presence of varroa but I couldn't tell if they were at levels high enough to need treatment.

They are the red brown crab shaped spots on the larva. There may have been more of them as some of the brood were drones which take longer to develop in the cell which gives the varroa mite longer to develop. I have put a collection floor on the hive to try and assess the level of infestation by counting the number that are dropped but I may treat them anyway.
I then gave the larvae to the chickens who enjoyed them immensely.

On Friday the weather was fine enough to go into hive 2 and put a new brood chamber above the old to try and tempt the colony onto clean fresh wax. I went through the old brood chamber removing brace comb wherever I could. This colony was nowhere near as strong as hive 3 and there was a small patch of bees dead in cells which was an indication of starvation over winter. This despite there being a large lump of candy still to eat in March. Still there was normal healthy brood in there and I actually spotted the queen. Of course by the time I reached for the cage to capture her, she had wandered off again so she is still unmarked like the others. I have put a weak sugar solution on this hive to fool them into thinking it is a nectar flow which is supposed to stimulate them into activity but they still seem very lethargic.

On Saturday teatime, I strolled down to see what the bees where doing and was sent into a panic by a large cloud of bees massing outside hive 3. Some of the books say that unusual activity can be sign that they are preparing to swarm. It would be very early for a swarm given the late spring we have had, but this is a large and active colony who had already shown signs that the brood chamber was not sufficient for their needs. I would have to go into the hive and see what was going on despite the weather still being on the cold side. Thinking I might as well kill two birds with one stone, I took the new brood body and started to transfer the frames over. The bees didn't like it. They had been trying to keep the hive at 35 degrees and now I was taking it apart in a temperature of about 12. They buzzed around angrily in a cloud and I got stung once on the inside of my elbow. I'm surprised it wasn't more.
Whilst doing my lightning quick inspection of angry bees, I did spot a queen cup at the side of one frame. It didn't appear to have anything in it. Queen cups can mean several things. The most harmless possibility is that  they are a practice for later in the season. The next possibility is in my efforts to get rid of the plastic pot of comb I have inadvertently killed the queen and the queen cell is an emergency replacement. However this would not be possible with an empty cell or even one with an egg laid in it that I didn't spot, as it would need the queen present to lay in it. The worst case scenario, is that the bees are preparing to swarm and building a queen cup to leave a new queen to take over the remnants of the hive after the majority of the bees have left with the old queen.
So my plan of action, is to inspect again either today or tomorrow and if the queen cell is sealed then I need to separate the queen cell and most of the bees from the queen and a couple of frames of brood. In other words do an artificial swarm so that the bees are in the position they would be after a swarm either queenless and building up the colony again or in a small colony led by the old queen which also needs building up. However I went to the Beverley Beekeepers Annual Auction (splendid, bought loads of stuff very cheap) and talking there to beekeepers, it was suggested that what I saw was an orientation flight, when young bees come out for the first time and buzz round trying to work out where they are, so all might be well and there could be no need to panic.
We shall see but I bet it won't be the first time I am panicking this season.

Of Quail and Chickens and Bees and Boys

Quail and Chickens and Bees and Boys are really all that I have been thinking about these last few days although I was forced to consider DIY as well when my neighbour complained that if I didn't do something about the garage door it was likely to blow down on her car in the next strong winds.

On the quail front, Tiny Quail died as expected, shortly after I had written about her. I think this is is actually a picture of Una but Tiny looked exactly the same, except a little smaller and less lively. Here is a picture of the quails in the brooder before Mopsy and Cottentail made their disastrous bid for freedom. Now that we have only one of the Golden Quail left, Rosie says that she doesn't want to call her Flopsy any more so names are being considered on a yellow theme from plain Goldie up to Celandine and Jonquil.

I have noticed these last two days, that Una is not looking very lively and does not seem to be growing very fast. It might be because of her poor start in life. but I worry that  she is not warm enough since I raised the heat lamp so that we could slip a grid across the top of the box to prevent the bigger two escaping.

Regarding the chickens, I have to report the sad news, that no sooner did I get the two new Fenton Rose birds, than one has been got by the fox.

It is very frustrating that I had kept her in the coop for a week to get used to where home is, and then only on Saturday,  started letting her free range in the garden. On Monday I let her out at 6.30 and by 9 she had disappeared. An investigation on the valley revealed a handful of feathers.
I had recently gone round the garden fences, checking and where necessary, blocking escape routes so it was very annoying. Of course if chickens indulge in this sort of behaviour what can they expect?

This is Amelia perching on top of the hen coop which is 7 if not 8 feet high. I should point out that Amelia has had her wings clipped, which is meant to unbalance her and make flying difficult. I would rather she didn't fly into the valley and offer herself as a meal for a fox, as she is at the moment, my only layer.

I was intending to write about bees next as I spent most of Monday putting hives and frames together and then yesterday hoping the weather would be good enough for the first spring inspection. It wasn't but we had a bit of a crisis so had to go in anyway. However the Boy has woken up and come into my bed so that tale will have to wait until tomorrow.
Rosie and I missed the Boy one morning, he wasn't in his room or the bathroom  and he hadn't gone downstairs. We found him in my room where he had quietly got into my bed, found my kindle and settled down to play on it.

  

Of Birds and Bees

Although I wrote the last post on Friday morning, I didn't get chance to publish it before I went away  to the BBKA convention. I think I shall have to write a separate post all about the convention as I have returned absolutely buzzing (of course) with ideas, in fact I stuffed my brain so full of new information that half way through the last lecture it put up the full signs and refused to accept any more.
I have returned earlier than I hoped, I wanted to stay the full three days but Sunday is the education day where there are all day workshops which must be pre booked, with only a few ad hoc lectures so it was not too difficult to decide to come home early. This is for two reasons, firstly it is the funeral of my cousin's husband tomorrow. Ian was a lovely man described rather surprisingly, by my sister in an email of condolence  to his brother in law, as a centaur. She meant that in the sixties, he was so outside our experience that he seemed almost mythical, our lower middle class childhood in an unexceptional suburb of Leeds, did not include handsome wealthy young business men who drove Aston Martins. Some of the boys of our acquaintance actually thought he was James Bond. He was also funny and down to earth and I am very sad at his death.
However because of the funeral, one of my other sisters is coming to stay so I thought it would not be a bad idea if I came home early to give the homestead a wash and brush up. This idea was further reinforced by a phone call I had with Rosie on Friday, when she realised that she didn't have her key and was locked out of the house all weekend. This didn't matter for Rosie, who could easily stay at her Dad's but the quail in the brooder box would be unattended for 48 hours.
So I changed my plans, after the last lecture on Saturday, I went and bought two new chickens. They are a new hybrid, Fenton Rose, and I have long fancied their sister the Fenton Blue to satisfy my hankering for blue eggs. They are only sold by two or three suppliers so it was convenient that one of them is based on the road between Newport,  where the convention was, and the M6. Chickens safely in their box, I went back to my motel and in half an hour had a shower, a burger, a cup of tea and caught up on the news, and then set off for home at 7.30. Later I wished I hadn't taken that half hour's rest.
Unlike Friday morning, the motorways were clear and I had a good drive, getting home about 9.30. I put the new chickens straight into the hen house, hoping that introducing them when the others were asleep would make it easier for them to be accepted in the morning and then went to check on the brooder. My worst fears, that the heat-lamp would set fire to their bedding, had not been realised. My second worst fears had, I only had three quail in the box, three were missing. I eventually tracked them down to a corner under the sofa. One was dead and another was dying. I tortured myself wondering if I hadn't taken that half hour's rest or I hadn't stopped to buy the chickens, I might have been in time to save the dying quail. I raised the heat-lamp to just above the box so that I could put a grid across to prevent further escapes. However this morning, Tiny Quail, the one that hatched on Thursday was looking very poorly. By raising the lamp I suspect I made it too cold for her, I lowered it again but she was not looking good.

Of Chickens ,Soap and Daughters

Yesterday, when I went to let my chickens out of their house, there were three neighbouring chickens waiting outside the coop. I thought it only fair that my chickens should be allowed to eat their breakfast in peace so  whilst letting Amelia and Bertie, out of their house, I kept the door to the run firmly shut,  thus condemning the visitors to pacing up and down outside in disgust.

Although I have no objection to the chickens coming in to socialise, my own chickens have first call on their food.
Later at dusk, I met my neighbour, Shaun looking for a Cream Legbar (probably the one in the centre of the picture above). He said that his chickens had started to enjoy flying over the fence, but that he was going to put a stop to it, and that shortly he would be going out to start erecting and that soon I would be able to see his erection in the garden. I thanked him for the warning and came back into the house.

Switching now to something totally pure, I have made a soap for people with sensitive skin. It has no colour or fragrance and no beeswax ( a very small number of people can be allergic to beeswax), instead it has borage seed oil and apricot kernel oil, both of which are good for sensitive skins.
It is the most beautiful pure white colour, the photo below doesn't do it justice.

Lastly, if you are thinking that I haven't been posting as much recently it is probably because the second daughter, Ellie has come home for the Easter holidays. This takes up my time in many ways, only this morning, I was obliged to spend some time explaining how, although last night's BBC version of The Lady Vanishes was more true to the original book, the 1938 Alfred Hitchcock film was in fact much, much better. This somehow led to us watching at least half an hour of it on Youtube. Normally, I am appalled when film makers alter books and add new characters and events that didn't happen in the original, but in this case it made a much better, more thrilling story. Maybe Hitchcock knew his stuff after all.

The Joys of Spring and Soap Labels

I was going to start today's post off with a moan about the weather, how cold and grey and miserable and more like November than March it is. I went on to the Valley specially to take a photo for you of the dreary grey wet landscape but then I saw this

 and this:

 Clearly Spring is on its way, its just having to fight to get here.
The hens weren't having any of this joys of spring nonsense, they looked exactly how L would feel if I'd been forced outside today; cold, wet and fed up.

Only two of those hens are mine by the way, the other two are visitors. I'm not sure from which neighbours garden though, I thought it was the right side but they seemed as if they were about to return (visit) the left side. No matter, they all return to there coops by nightfall.
So today has been an inside day .
I turned out the new batch of Lemon and Lime soap but can't say that it is a more noticeable yellow colour than the last batch:

I think I was a bit too cautious when adding the annatto colour there. Third time lucky I hope.

The new batch of Gardener's soap came out a terrific colour though. I like it a lot and it frees up the subtle pale green colour to be used by Verbena.

 The rest of the day has been spent playing with label design. I discovered Avery do a pack of oval labels on kraft brown background which I was instantly smitten with. I have been trying different fonts and experimenting with colours and here are some of the results:

 Aren't they lovely?
The idea was that I would wrap each soap in brown kraft paper and then stick a label on the front with probably another on the back for ingredients and address and all the legal gubbins. The prototype looks like this:

But then I printed the labels off on cream business weight paper and experimented with wrapping the soap in that with no extra label. It looks better than I expected:

 I think I still like the brown label better though. Both are just experiments of course, if you are thinking that the visible creases and the jagged edge to the paper don't really cut the mustard.
More exciting news is that I have a launch date for my first sales. It will be be more in the way of a dress rehearsal than the first night, as I am sharing a stall with 3 other members of the Leeds Beekeepers Association at Thwaite Mills Industrial Museum on Easter Sunday. I don't know how much room there will be for my products but it will be quite nice to have other people there to ease me back into the routine of standing behind a stall. I'm also hoping that there will be lots of bee chat that I can pick up useful tips from.
If anyone is in the Leeds area over Easter and fancies coming down to talk soap or bees (or quail or cakes or whatever) it would be good to see you.

The Balanced Scorecard- 2013 to date

It is cold and grey and I have been feeling more than a little lethargic recently so I thought it was a good time to review the year to date and see what progress I'd made in the main headings.
The balanced scorecard is a concept from accountancy which means setting targets in areas of the business rather than just financial ie no good congratulating yourselves on record sales if your safety record is dire and customer service appalling. When I worked for a clinical waste company that tried to implement this, the drivers had to record if they had missed any collections and why (normally accidents or traffic holdups), it  then amused me to discover that they were allowed to input a code meaning tactical miss as if it could every be a part of a company's tactics not to service its customers. In practice these were occasions where to stop at a clinic to pick up one bin of waste would make the driver too late to pick up 20 from a hospital. Still no tactical misses allowed here.
So the headings on my scorecard in no particular order are:
  Poultry
  Bees
  Garden
  Frugal Living & Food
  Soap Business
  House & Garage
  Personal Development
  Crafts
  Wildlife

Possibly I should have one for health and wellbeing but I think the list is quite long enough so I will roll that in with personal development

Poultry
This has been going well, there was the sad loss of Amelia (or was it Edna they looked very much alike) but to offset that Edna is laying well and I managed to partially roof the run and also get their wings clipped. In the incubator upstairs are the 11 little quail eggs, committing me, should they hatch to sorting out first a brooder box and then a cage for them. The brooder box would also be able to be used by chickens in due time.
Bees
I'm also satisfied with the bees. Truthfully there is little I can do in winter apart from ensure they have enough food and the hives are protected from mice and woodpeckers but to see all three hives were alive and active mid February was encouraging. I have also booked to attend the British Bee Keeping Association Spring Convention in April which I'm sure will fire my enthusiasm to learn more and there is my name down on the swarm collection list for summer.
Garden
Progress has been made, seeds have been sown, currant bushes pruned, larger trees cut back at risk to life and limb. As always there is much more to do, more seeds need sowing, the greenhouse needs cleaning, the prunings need chopping up and disposing of, the vegetable plot needs digging and preparing but I can take satisfaction from the fact that I haven't been ignoring the garden throughout the cold weather.
Frugal Living and Food
Here I think I may have been concentrating too much. I have done terrifically well on my frugal food challenge but possibly at the expense of other items on the scorecard. I have already posted that I seem to be baking everyday and as I write I do have a carrotcake in the oven (made with dried cranberries instead of raisins for a change and because I had them in the cupboard). Going forward the challenge will be to try and turn the efforts I have made since Christmas into normal routine but  to keep them in their place. I want to keep on making my own bread and cakes and biscuits but to make the freezer take the place of the convenience store. As Rosie has decided that she does like Chicken Korma, the Curry in a Hurry curry base will become a regular in it as will other dishes that allow me to concentrate on other things some days.
Soap Business
The other things will mainly be the soap business which I am ashamed to say has not made huge progress since Christmas despite being my hope for an income this year. I have attended a course at the Chamber of Commerce (run on a Wednesday which is why postings can be scarce on that day) and I have had regular meetings with a business mentor who has been helping me with my business plan and cashflow forecast to be submitted to a board who should approve me receiving Enterprise Allowance. I feel that all this guestimating future sales and doing market research on the natural cosmetic industry has distracted my attention from the important parts of the business namely making a good product with attractive packaging. Must try harder.
House and Garage
I haven't been doing too much in this category either, I have done some mild decluttering, bought a new freezer which will reduce my energy bills and we now have a working shower once more. There is much decluttering left to do and a list of DIY projects as long as my arm but I am relaxed over this, I am sure I will do more in the warmer weather.
Personal Development
Well this is quite a wide category, I include it, as it is part of the balanced life that I should keep learning and keep trying new things. Writing the blog has been very pleasurable and I would like to do more writing in future. Joining the reading group will also be good for me as it will make me read books I would not have chosen myself. I have also agreed to go on a dry stone wall building day, I can't see any immediate use for that knowledge but it will be interesting. I suspect that I am falling back on the health and exercise front since Jess left. The compulsory twice daily walks were getting me fitter and keeping the calories at bay. I shall have to do more about this before summer as I need to drop a dress size having bought a wet suit in a sale that was a size too small. Ho hum. I've also learned that I am not a dog person, although Jess left us because she was not getting on with Oliver, I didn't find enough compensation in having a dog for all the work and time involved. I may have liked the image of me strolling through the countryside with a dog at my heels but not the reality. Jess is now living with someone who finds having a dog all over you every time you sit down, enjoyable.
Crafts
I am a craft person, I enjoy almost everything that involves making things with your hands. Sadly I am not artistic, I can't paint or draw but I can sew and knit and embroider and hook rugs and generally have a go at anything which involves reading a set of instructions and visualising what they mean. In the last few years I have been extending this to try to tackle DIY projects ie plastering, fence building. Last summer shocked by the price of a new one, I attempted to build a bee hive which is basically a series of wooden boxes. I managed it but also discovered that I can't cut straight. As I need two more bee hives (or at least brood boxes) and a quail house and a broody house then I think I will be learning a lot more about woodworking this coming year. I was going to go on a course but had to cancel as I couldn't leave Jess alone in the house for two days. Likewise I couldn't do any knitting whilst she was with us, as she kept pouncing on the wool, but I have wool and the pattern for knitting Oliver a sweater.
Wildlife
The part of having a dog that I did really enjoy was being forced out for a walk and seeing wildlife. I really enjoyed seeing the small changes that happened almost daily. I can't do anything about this as the twice daily walks were taking up too much time and leading to other things being neglected, but I am going to make the effort to get out once a week at least. I have my tree spotting to continue and I am of course missing the kingfisher.

Apologies for the very long post but I have found it helpful, it has reassured me that really I have made progress since the start of the year and it has pointed out areas where I need to spend less time (food planning) and areas where I need to spend more (soap business).

Quailing at the prospect

Although that isn't true, I'm quite excited at the prospect. I have been fancying keeping quail since I started keeping chickens. Unlike chickens, if you keep quail you keep them in a cage or aviary, due to their habit of shooting 20 foot in the air when startled and flying off in a straight line, there is no nagging worry that really they ought to be free range and hence no retrieving of quail from next door's garden. Although they can make a variety of noises, the cocks do not crow thus it is easy and beneficial even to keep them in groups of one cock to three hens giving the prospect of raising little quail. And they do lay their posh little eggs. Most people eat then hard boiled and use them decoratively but I do rather fancy having 6 little poached eggs dotted around my toast for breakfast.
Anyway I decided to leap in and order a dozen eggs to put in the incubator. Hence the parcel that arrived yesterday

 When buying chicken eggs, they are normally sent in specially designed polystyrene protective boxes. Either they don't make these for quail's eggs or my ebay seller is as much into recycling as I am, for the packaging had a definite home made look about it

Whether it was as a result of that or just one of those things, one of the eggs arrived broken but no matter, they cost me £5 including postage and are very much an experiment. If it works, I will have my quail and I will also have had the pleasure of watching them hatch. I have seen quail chicks described on the internet as like fluffy bumblebees and I can't wait.
However my incubator is of the cheapest of the cheap variety and there is much that can go wrong. It has a thermostat and a fan and a thermometer and hygrometer (for reading humidity) but last year when trying to hatch chicken eggs I had two failures. Both times it was due to the bulb which provides the heat, failing and allowing the eggs to get cold. The first time, one chick heartbreakingly made it through to hatching only to die within 24 hours.

 Quails eggs should take 18 days to hatch and I shall post updates regularly. As it is a basic incubator I shall have to turn the eggs every 4 hours or so to stop the growing embryo sticking to one side, because of this I have moved the incubator to the side of the bed which means that I should also be able to keep a better eye on the bulb. Oliver thinks the box is for cooking eggs, we will have to impress on him that he isn't to open the lid until they are done. He will get a surprise if the eggs hatch.
After 5 days (for chickens at least, not sure about quail) the eggs can be candled by shining a bright light through the shell to check if there is a living embryo inside. This is a magical moment, a bit like having a scan in pregnancy when the egg stops being just an egg and turns into the home of a living creature.Sadly I can't think of any way I could take photos of this to share with you. You'll just have to take my word for it.
So they went in to the incubator at 10 am on Friday 22nd February and hopefully they will emerge some time between Sunday 10th March and Wednesday 13th March. I'll keep you posted.

Progress Report

This search of mine for the good life does not always move forward smoothly, recently I seem to have been plagued by a series of annoyances although I suppose one of them could be called a tragedy.
On Friday, when I went to give the chickens their afternoon corn, there were only two birds waiting by the gate. This was unusual, the birds do often wander, particularly to join the other chickens in the next door garden but they are nearly always back for tea and if one is laggardly, the sound of the other two enjoying their nosh, normally brings her running. I was concerned but hoped she'd return in time and took Jess onto the valley for her late afternoon walk. We had not gone far, before I came across a sorry pile of familiar feathers, so I presume that Edna had gone wandering too far from the safety of the garden and met a grisly end at the hands of a fox.
The other annoyances were much more mundane and mainly seem to feature Dog ie Dog ate half a bowl of bread dough left to rise on the kitchen table,with the inevitable follow up: Dog suffered diarrhoea on the kitchen floor. Then there was Dog upset at being left in the kitchen whilst I put Oliver to bed managing to hurl herself at the kitchen door and dislodge the screws from the bottom hinge leaving the door hanging on by a whisker.
Monday's annoyance was to get halfway up the street before realising I had a puncture. Kind neighbours dropped Oliver and I at his nursery, leaving me to walk the two miles home. It could have been quite a nice walk had it not been for the cold, cold wind and my being in such a hurry when I set out, not to keep kind neighbours waiting that I forgot my scarf and gloves.
Today I was expecting to be able to make a much more upbeat report as I went on the first of three courses on setting up your own business but a lot of it was stuff that I was familiar with already, from when I had my chutney business. The first half of the session seemed to be trying to  prepare people for long hours and risks and stresses of running a business. There were some interesting points though, including the pros and cons of being  a sole trader compared with a limited company and on choosing a business name. I'm expecting next week's talk to be much more practical as there is someone coming in from HMRC to give us the lowdown on what is tax deductible and what we must do if we want to employ somone.

A Black Dog in a White World

We didn't get as much snow as I was expecting, but still as I walked out on the valley beyond the bottom of my garden, the combination of the snow and all encompassing cloud made everything eerily white

Jess disturbed a pair of foxes who bounded off into the undergrowth. Lovely to watch but disturbingly close to my chickens. On my return I checked on the beehives but there was very little snow on them.

A cold winter is actually better for bees, than a mild one. Mild weather at the wrong time can entice them out of the hive when there is no pollen to collect.The chickens are now benefiting from the roofing panels I put up over the chicken run, which has given them a dry snow free corner to get at their food. I may put up another panel though, as the entrance board to the house was covered with snow, which they wouldn't like.That can wait for better weather. This afternoon I will be indoors, on the sofa, wrapped in my knitted blanket. I would like to say that I will be on the laptop, working on the cash-flow forecast for the soap business, but it is more likely that I will be gazing mesmerised out of the window, watching the hundreds of tiny white flakes dancing dizzily down to earth.

Muffins and the Perfect Poached Egg

Having new laid eggs again, made me want to make Eggs Benedict which is basically a poached egg on bacon on half a toasted muffin with hollandaise sauce on top. Delicious.

All I needed was to pick up a pack of muffins from the supermarket, but then I thought it would be cheaper and more fun to make my own.For bread makers amongst you, it is a pound of flour (I used half and half strong white and wholemeal) and then uses milk instead of water, the recipe said 12 fl oz but as always, I added more liquid when it looked too dry and then had to add more flour. A teaspoon of dried yeast (I use the sort that has to be reconstituted as I find it more flexible to have a tub rather than sachets), a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of butter. Put all that in the dough maker and set it to dough and go away and leave it for a while, or thump it around for ten minutes if you are kneading by hand. My bread-maker was the cheapest model available, is now three or four years old and is invaluable, but I only ever use it on the dough setting to take the effort out of kneading and give the dough a good start that it wouldn't get otherwise in my none too warm kitchen.

When the dough was well risen ( I went out and left it for a while but I'd say a couple of hours after the dough programme had finished), I rolled it out and cut it into 3 1/2 inch rounds and left them twenty minutes or so to prove. The recipe said to sprinkle them with rice flour or semolina, I had ground rice in the cupboard which worked just as well but I don't think it would have mattered if I'd skipped that bit. Certainly not worth buying anything specially.

Then came the interesting bit of cooking them on a griddle which I haven't got so used a frying pan instead.

It said cook on a medium heat for 7 minutes each side but I found myself turning the heat down so they didn't become too brown too quickly. Probably because my frying pan is too thin.

So there you are, eight large muffins for maybe 30p. Four of them have already been tucked away in the freezer to stop me eating them all at once. Another time I would make a double batch, as it was a bit of an effort for only eight, I would also make them thinner as they are too fat for my toaster.

So this morning, Rosie, said she would like a poached egg on a muffin. The huge benefit of keeping chickens is the freshness of the eggs (when they lay) and the ease with which they will poach. All that is needed is to slip the egg into an inch or so of barely simmering water like this:

And a couple of minutes later, you have the perfect poached egg, like this:

DIY with help

Today is my day for looking after my grandson Oliver who is nearly three. It was a beautiful sunny day  so I thought we could be outside in the garden with Jess the pup, whilst I tackled a DIY project that I have been putting off for a couple of months.
I have been wanting to give the chickens a roof to their coop or at least one corner of it. Last winter they hated the snow so I covered the run in a tarpaulin which worked for a while but sagged when full of heavy rain and made the run darker than it need be. So I thought a quick solution would be to screw clear PVC panels to the roof.
 My first worry would be whether I could get the 8ft length of them into the car but we just managed it.

















That was in November and somehow the panels were put into the garage and left there. Either the weather was wrong or I was busy with something else or it was Christmas but today there were no excuses.
It was a lot easier than I'd imagined, it would have been even easier if I hadn't had a toddler climbing the ladder behind me saying 'What you doing? What you doing?' on a loop/ Pup also had to be shut in the house when I needed to get in the run with the chickens and then whined piteously the whole time.
Still it is finished now and will give the chickens a nice dry place to go to.

I was intending to post this last night but had one of those unfortunate accidents that happen when you have a toddler, a puppy and a bowl of soup. I left the laptop overnight to dry out and things seem okay now.