Monday, March 30, 2015

Harsh March isn't over Yet





Let's start off with today's good news. The Boxelder blooms were still juicy enough after two cold days of no flying that the girls were still working them today. I spent many hours out working under the constant buzz of thousands of working bees and even managed to use the zoom on the camera to get a pretty good picture of one girl going from bloom to bloom.

I also got the last of the old junk out of my pastures today although it hasn't been cut up and hauled off yet.  SO I made a little progress on the fence project.

That's about it for the good news. Now for the bad.

I slept about 3 hours after checking the ram and the ewes at about 3 AM then got up to do it again. Lamar the ram was not looking so good.  I did a head count on all the ewes and checked to see if there were any tell tale signs of lambing activity, fed em all and then went and watched Lamar for a while. He was once again not urinating and obviously in distress over it. We called the vet and they said the only procedure left (ok there were two) would require us to take him to the university vet hospital. We actually called and found out what it would cost and the survival rate along with the percentage chance of him still being a viable ram after it was done.

The statistics were not all that appealing let me tell you. Since Lamar wasn't in vocal pain as yet we decided to wait it out and see if maybe he would pass the crystals. I then got out the riding mower and my small trailer to take a trip to the back and pick up the dead out hive I had back there. My big trailer is down while I repack the u-joints on it and the pasture is still a bit too wet for the tractor anyway. The mower wouldn't leave any ruts and we all now how much I hate ruts.

I got down there and discovered that sometime in the last week I lost another hive. So that makes my Winter losses two hives now and both went down in March. Both had emergency sugar on their tops as well and both hives were active at the end of February during the warm snap. March is just a hard month on bees around here.

Oh I guess another good thing is my lawnmower worked fine. No repairs needed on it I guess that's always a good thing for the first running of Spring. We will see if it lasts two mowing though.

I then spent the rest of the day watching Lamar for hopes of improvement and going through my two dead out hives before pests could move in.




Each frame had to be removed from the six boxes and checked for dead bees in the cells that will rot and mold if not removed. Any frames not built up yet are added to the new frame boxes I have for adding to hives later while frames that are filled with comb but empty will be frozen and then used for swarms or in the traps. All the burr comb is removed for melting later in the Summer in my solar wax melter.




The entire bottom board of one hive is covered in about a half inch of dead bees and wax cappings from being robbed out after they died. I am not sure if these two hives starved or were maybe too small in numbers to weather the last cold snap we had. I saw no mites in the oil traps but who knows. One hive was three years old and the other two years old so they should have made it.

Oh well those are the breaks. Still only about a 18% loss rate for Winter.

By about 4 PM the vet was ready to either head back to the office or stop by and the decision was made. Lamar hadn't eaten or drank anything today and was still unable to urinate. He was barely able to stand up after about 2PM so we put him down. I am amazed whenever I witness the procedure as the animal goes out so fast. We paid our neighbor the backhoe guy to come over and dug the deepest hole I have seen in years to bury him in. The backhoe arm was all the way extended into the ground and never hit a rock nor more than one layer of hardpack.

At least I know we have some nice dirt here.

Anyway stuff happens. We noticed yesterday that the feed bag we are using now has a small printed warning not to feed it to male sheep. It's the same brand we been using for years and the feed store sold us as sheep feed when we started and I remember the owner showing us then it was for sheep and no warning label. We called and told him about it and he was as surprised as we were.

Needless to say we are changing the diets around here right now.

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!!!


21 comments:

  1. Sorry to hear about your little buddy. I guess that's life on the farm. Its amazing how much work goes into honey, you just never think about it.

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    1. Rob - It certainly has it's periods when it is a lot of work like right about now. Spring inspections and well inspections in general get much more time consuming as you get more hives too.

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  2. PP,

    I'm so sorry to hear about Lamar. I know it's expected owning a farm but you still get attached to your animals.

    Enough bad things for one day, tomorrow will be a better day.

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    1. Sandy - He was getting a bit aged but had proven to be a good ram and I was kinda fond of him really. The vet bills and now finding a new ram are going to really set us back this year.

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  3. That's good info, thanks. I dont have sheep but other male species are susceptible to kidney stones.
    we had goats a long time ago and they got into the calf starter...which contains amprolium. Poison to sheep/goats. Its an antociccidial and they had to be put down.
    With the seemingly constant contamination of mass produced feed i try to rely more on homegrown feed.

    I like the the smell of box elders although my fil (a nursery owner) described them as smelling like urine.

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    1. fjord - Moving towards producing our own feed for the sheep is one of my top priorities. We already produce the hay we need but I don't have all the implements to bale it myself yet so we have to hire out. Most of those feeds these days are just byproducts anyway. I don't know why the sheep love em so much.

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    2. Because it would appear that every species has a hankering for junk food.

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    3. Molasses...
      grow some sorghum

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    4. Elizabeth - Ain't that the truth. What get's me is how a feed company can change their formula like that without a huge label saying they did.

      sj - Sorghum is on my list. I am putting some new pasturage in Millet this Spring for grazing then looking in to adding some small grain fields for feed.

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  4. Real sorry about Lamar. Real sorry about the vet bill too.

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    1. GM - Thank you. The vet bill is going to cut into the profits for this year hard, add tot hat the fencing project and looks like another year in the red.

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  5. Boxelder has bloom out here but we were at 15 one night so I am wondering if it messed them up.I haven't seen any peach blooms so I suspect that the cold late last fall did them in.
    I was wondering how the ram would make it through all of that trauma, I mean just imagine.
    I have one mower that gave me trouble last fall so I know that I will be working on that one but the old one that I used around the garden should fire as I worked on it last summer. If I was using my head, I would have put a fuel filter on both of them as that is where the problem comes and the small mowers don't come with them. The jet hole is so small that I have to take a strand of braided wire to work the hole open from the dust like dirt that blocks them.

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    1. Sf - My mowers anymore seem to make it through Winter and usually I will get one good cutting out of them in April before they start acting up. Not sure how it happens that way. Then I end up spending money on getting them fixed.

      The thing with this ram just really makes me sick. At what point the feed switched it's ingredients or found out it caused this and didn't print it on the side in big letters is beyond me. We been using this stuff for almost a decade now as my Mother fed it to her first lamb and he is still fine.

      I didn't know that about the mowers. I have an old craftsman push mower with the big back wheels that seems to be indestructible. That thing rarely needs work done. In fact I liked it so much I went out bought a second one when I saw one for sale at a yard sale just so I could have two of them. My riding mower on the other hand is getting old and something has to break or fall off it each year now it seems.

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  6. I'm so sorry to hear about Lamar. And about your 2 hives. I have a friend that just started keeping bees last year. She staved off a swarm just a couple of weeks ago, didn't even know you could do that. There is so much to learn. We hope to have a few hives once we retire to the country.

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    1. DFW - The learning curve kinda grows on you with your hives really. Keeping a couple hives is a worthy goal and something I encourage but if the bug bites ya you may end up with 30 hives before ya know it :)

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  7. PP - i am very sorry to hear about Lamar, and your 2 hives. i know how much you care for your animals.

    much love bro! your friend,
    kymber

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    1. kymber - Well I was hesitant right up to the end but the Vet assured me he was going to be in excruciating pain and it was best to do it before the bladder ruptured. I kept hoping he would pull out of it. I have been present at a couple of large animal euthanasia sessions and I am always amazed at how fast that stuff works. It's almost seems too quick and easy for ending a life.

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  8. Sorry to hear about Lamar. Poor guy. Sorry about your hives as well. Looking forward to the new lambs and maybe there'll be a Lamar Jr you can keep around.

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    1. Izzy - We actually talked about maybe keeping one of his offspring intact for that reason. Just have to keep him away from MOM lol. But the issue is he would also be related to all but six ewes directly too and they are the oldest ewes so not sure it is worth it.

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  9. Sorry to hear Preppy. The change in the labeling on the feed bag surprises me a little big, at least that the retailer did not know. In my line of work, we are notified when manufacturers are making changes, even if there is little impact.

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    1. TB - Well it's possible it happened years ago. We been feeding the same feed for well over 7 years and honestly I wasn't the one who started with this feed nor did I ever check it. My mother started it and swore it was Sheep safe until this incident and she saw the warning label she claims was not there before. I was there when she asked the feed store owner about it and he was surprised as well for what that's worth.

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