There are good reasons to have your queens marked, including:
Ease in locating the queen during inspections.
Confirm the hive hasn’t swarmed.
Confirm the queen hasn’t been superseded. This can be very important in areas that have Africanized honeybees.
Unfortunately, many folks don’t have marked queens. Whether it not being an option when the purchased their queens, not wanting to pay the extra money to have it done, or they have raised their own queens.
For those that realize the benefit of having marked queens and would like to mark their queens, I have included a short demonstration video below.
Our rooster got beat up badly by a fox in the Spring and it was questionable if he would make it. Fortunately he has recovered quite well. During his recovery, he wasn’t fertilizing the eggs, so when one of our hens went broody, we weren’t too optimistic of how many chicks we would get. Turned out for the worst, no eggs hatched. But the poor hen was so determined, she continued to sit on the eggs even after some of them started to exploded. We were not aware of this until we smelled the stench of the rotten eggs. I immediately cleaned out the nest and disposed of the mess. The poor hen, Henny Penny (as our son named her), didn’t seem to understand and was all discombobulated. So for the heck of it, I made a new nest in the same nesting box and placed some Guinea eggs in it. She knew it and refused to lay on them and returned to perch with the others for the night. To my surprise, the next morning I found her nesting on the eggs. I figured it was a long shot that she would continue to lay on the eggs for 28 more days after already spending almost a month on the batch of bad eggs. Well she did, and now we have a proud mom with guinea keets. I’m hoping they will be calmer than the normal guineas, and so far, they seem to be. They are going on 6 weeks old, and at night, some of them roost on mom’s back.
We have a black & yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia) living in the burning bushes by the south side of our house. My son and I enjoy feeding it Japanese beetles and watching the spider mummify them. It is even more enjoyable than feeding them to the Guinea keets. Unfortunately, there are more than enough Japanese beetles to go around. Here is a short video clip of the spider in action.
I was out in the yard working tonight when our black lab Cinder started barking. The guinea hens where in the yard wandering around and squawking, but not the serious trouble type of squawk. I immediately thought a bear. I had gotten a call on Friday from my parents neighbor that a bear had knocked a hive off my parents’ garage roof, so I knew it was that time of the year. I quickly ran around the chicken coop to see what she was barking at and realized that there was something in the live trap. Continue Reading »
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