Arizona Chickens

[City farm]

~~I guess I should update you all on the Easter chick saga at our humble coop! It is fun to be able to share all of this with folks who care to hear all the nitty gritty details So...I placed 8 fertile eggs under two broody hens - a red sex link and a bantam cochin. I candled them at about day 8, and only 2 were growing. I left those eggs under the red and put two fake wooden eggs under the bantam....On Easter morning, one of the eggs hatched! According the to breeds it came from, it appears to be a barred rock, and the kids named her Jelly Bean. The bantam (who is very mean and pecky, by the way) was still sitting on fake eggs, and I felt bad, as this is about the 5th time she has gone broody with no payoff, plus we really wanted more chicks and to take advantage of the hens mothering them for us -- so I went and bought four 3-day old chicks from Ace Hardware (2 black Austrolorps, an Americauna, and a RR) and put them underneath the chickens in the dark of night -- the blacks under the bantam and the other two with the red hen and Jelly Bean. They accepted them! But by mid-morning they all re-arranged, and the 4 new chicks ended up being with the bantam. The hatched chick (Jelly Bean) stayed with the red....All seemed great, then I went to check on them in the afternoon, and the bantam was hunkered in a corner with a bloody face with the chicks all pecking at it. Then I saw the red go after her again, and also after any of the other chicks that came near to her. I think she was even keeping them from food and water. So...I had to figure out a way to separate the two groups. Took much of the day to get it all straightened out. Meanwhile, I sustained a lot of serious pecks from the bantam while trying to doctor her wound or do anything with her chicks. You can see in the picture where the bantam's face was injured, and I applied purple Wound-Kote...until I was able to really hold her down, she shook a bunch and threw semi-permanent purple spots all over my face and hands ~~Super cute though, eh? And all worth it?

Awheee, so adorable... We just had 4 new babies hatch last night or this morning.. At work & can't wait to get home to see if there is more pip'n...

 

[Sill]

They were from multiple fly traps that I left laying out in the sun for months and months---finally got tired of looking at them all and dumped all the contents in a 5-gal bucket. Very dry and no smell at that point. Then I kept adding to it. Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. I am really sorry I fed them to the chickens, tapeworms are hard to get rid of. I have too many chickens for meal worms to make a dent in their diet. Down to about 115 adults now, but I've been hatching for a couple of months and don't even know how many chicks I have, probably 2-3 hundred, I'm guessing. Pretty soon I'll be going through them and culling some out. I held back some males I wouldn't have otherwise kept because I want to learn how to caponize. If my kits ever get here from China. For extra animal protein for the chickens, my property generates a large # of mice and packrats.

Do you trap the mice and packrats for the chickens? How do you feed the rodents to them?

Exactly.. Any excuse to go there, I am IN!!

I think we have over 100 potted plants.. If I ever have any extra clippings, we will share.. My favorite sentence is,
"I have a free plant for you!!" my family said I can not bring another plant home.. So now I have over 500 seed packets..

Yikes! No more plants? Wait they said you cannot bring more home, but what if you get some trades?

My family knows better than to limit my plants. I'm happiest when I get more plants.

Seeds, now those are great to hoard. They take up so little space.

 

[Sill]

Those of you that are culturing meal worms for your chickens can you keep them outside in the summer here if they are in the shade? I told my poor bug-phobic DH I was going to start culturing meal worms in a closet and he came unglued. He is fine with my black soldier fly composter since it's outside.
Bugs in the house? On purpose?

So...if meal worms can survive on a shady patio in summer here I'll try them. I need to keep my DH happy with no bugs in the house.

 

[LadyKotaDoria]

 
They were from multiple fly traps that I left laying out in the sun for months and months---finally got tired of looking at them all and dumped all the contents in a 5-gal bucket. Very dry and no smell at that point. Then I kept adding to it. Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things. I am really sorry I fed them to the chickens, tapeworms are hard to get rid of. I have too many chickens for meal worms to make a dent in their diet. Down to about 115 adults now, but I've been hatching for a couple of months and don't even know how many chicks I have, probably 2-3 hundred, I'm guessing. Pretty soon I'll be going through them and culling some out. I held back some males I wouldn't have otherwise kept because I want to learn how to caponize. If my kits ever get here from China. For extra animal protein for the chickens, my property generates a large # of mice and packrats.

Do you trap the mice and packrats for the chickens?  How do you feed the rodents to them?

Exactly.. Any excuse to go there, I am IN!!

I think we have over 100 potted plants.. If I ever have any extra clippings, we will share.. My favorite sentence is,

"I have a free plant for you!!" my family said I can not bring another plant home.. So now I have over 500 seed packets..

Yikes!  No more plants?  Wait they said you cannot bring more home, but what if you get some trades?

My family knows better than to limit my plants. I'm happiest when I get more plants.

Seeds, now those are great to hoard. They take up so little space.

Oh my God! I have seeds! No, I mean I have seeds!!! $$$.¢¢ of seeds. Looks like I will need a home for seeds as well!

 

[LadyKotaDoria]

Those of you that are culturing meal worms for your chickens can you keep them outside in the summer here if they are in the shade?  I told my poor bug-phobic DH I was going to start culturing meal worms in a closet and he came unglued.  He is fine with my black soldier fly composter since it's outside.
Bugs in the house?  On purpose?

So...if meal worms can survive on a shady patio in summer here I'll try them.  I need to keep my DH happy with no bugs in the house.

I have a nice bag of meal worm bedding..... Any takers? Otherwise I was going to put it in the garden.

 

[desertmarcy]

Yes, I trap the rodents in Have-a-Hart traps, they reproduce faster than I have time and energy to set traps. They cause a lot of digging and chewing problems, so I'd trap them with or without chickens to eat them, but am happy to give the chickens the animal protein---"free range organic meat"--

. They do not seem to know what to do with a whole animal, so after killing them with a quick head whack, I use a pair of serrated kitchen shears and cut them up into chicken bite-sized pieces and mix in enough water in a bowl so that the fur isn't fuzzy and flying everywhere---when cut up like this, the chickens will eat everything, fur, guts, bones: and lick the bowl clean. It is a bit tedious to cut them up, there must be an easier method but I do not have any kitchen appliance I am willing to use to grind up a mouse or packrat

They might be more interested in a live mouse but if I throw a dead one in the pen, even my ravenous Barred Rocks just look at it. But last year, I scared a mouse out, which ran from the pen it was in, through the next pen which had Rhode Island Red growing cockerels, and then into the next pen, which had some already huge growing Barred Rock cockerels and that mouse was history! One of them snatched it right up.

 

[kpgoldstar]

Oh my God!

I have seeds! No, I mean I have seeds!!! $$$.¢¢ of seeds. Looks like I will need a home for seeds as well!

Wasn't Gallo going to start a seed collection box and send it around the State? Take what you want, fill it with things you don't want.. send it off to the next person on the list. Maybe we need to get that going during the summer planting doldrums.

 

[carnivore]

Oh my God!

I have seeds! No, I mean I have seeds!!! $$$.¢¢ of seeds. Looks like I will need a home for seeds as well!

Feed 'em to your chickens!

 

[Demosthine]

Those of you that are culturing meal worms for your chickens can you keep them outside in the summer here if they are in the shade? I told my poor bug-phobic DH I was going to start culturing meal worms in a closet and he came unglued. He is fine with my black soldier fly composter since it's outside.
Bugs in the house? On purpose?

So...if meal worms can survive on a shady patio in summer here I'll try them. I need to keep my DH happy with no bugs in the house.

Before you go out and buy everything, if you're interested, I'll get with you and you can have my collection. I have a 10-gallon aquarium with plenty of bran in it, and a nice assortment of mealworms at various stages. They've been going for eight months or so. I forget exactly. This popular getting old routine is for the birds... Anyway, I have no use for them anymore. It has a mesh screen lid on it, so even if they wanted to, they couldn't fly out. I've never heard of anyone actually having them fly, though.

 

[Demosthine]

Does anyone in the valley know of a beekeepers supply store? I had several boxes of bee hive parts sitting on the side of my house and with the warmer weather, noticed a few bees interested. So when I went to start relocating the boxes, I found a colony had established an actual hive in one of the deep supers. There were no frames inside, so they just built their own combs. You can see them in the picture below. But tonight, I took the rest of the pieces out and actually set up the hive. I moved the deep super over to the corner of the yard and set it on the base. I added six frames to it to fill the other half where the natural combs were not at. After a few weeks, I'll check it all again and probably remove the wild combs. In the meantime, I need to get some equipment. I gave everything I had to City Farm, who's friend set it up and immediately attracted a swarm of her own! I need to start building more supers and frames in the meantime.

​

On an interesting note, the wax combs from the old frames is a black color, which strikes me as very odd considering everything else I've seen is white or yellow colored. It has a very strong chocolate flavor to me, too! I really wish I had have been able to talk to the ol' timer when I got them from his wife, but he wasn't there. He was from out of state, so the possibilities are endless. I'll try to post some photos of the wax that I removed when the lighting is better. It smells so good, though. This new hive's wax is pure white. I need to research the differences.