Rainbow

Glenn, Oliver and I went on a walk today to look for wildflowers. We were almost able to find ROYGBIV. I had to settle for a ladybug because we couldn't locate a red flower.







Otter followed us the entire way. He is a good example of "gray."

My Neighborhood

I’m proud to live on Parkhill Road. We have it all here on Parkhill, beautiful land with oak trees, neighbors growing vegetables to feed the neighborhood, donkeys, gun shots and meth labs (or so I’ve heard). On a typical walk you can encounter wildflowers, deer, friendly people, barking dogs, and people peering at you through the windows of their trailers, ready to shoot the moment your foot clears the property line. I checked and not a single Parkhill neighbor has made it on the registered sex offender list. Thank goodness there isn't an illegal drug list. I took pictures to give you an idea of the wide range of encounters one will have strolling around our neighborhood.

Oliver took this picture of one of the friendliest horses on our walks. I love being able to run into horses and donkeys just a short distance from the house.


Ahh, some of the beautiful wildflowers we saw on our walk.


If there is a dead deer within one mile of the house, Pumpkin will find it and try to bring its leg home to chew.


Look at the beautiful orchard just up the road with unique “dandy lions.”


This gate belongs to one of our friendly neighbors. The sign should say “shot, then eaten.”


Oliver, don’t touch that latex glove! We found this glove, an empty pack of cigarettes and a beer can on this stretch of road. Being a nurse, I guess I'm pleased they used a latex glove. Safety first but please don't litter!

Wildflower Bike Ride

People who ride bicycles are cool. I do not own a bike. I do however want to support bike riding when I can. That is the reason Oliver and I got out of bed at 7:30 today. The annual one hundred mile Wildflower ride includes our country road (Parkhill). Oliver and I headed down the driveway to cheer on the riders and take photographs. EVERY rider waved, said good morning, or rang a bell for Oliver (and we watched the riders for almost two hours). I'm hoping these types of experiences will help inspire Oliver to love bicycles!

Here are a few of the shots Oliver took of the bicycle riders this morning:

Swarm Update

Glenn and I (with help from Grammy, Oliver and Owen) opened up the new hive today and were pleased to find the swarm bees busy at work. I have been reading "Beekeeping for Dummies" and found the inspection much more interesting with the information I picked up from the book.

We observed drones in the new hive. The drones are male bees and are pretty much worthless except for their mating abilities. They are easy to spot (when you know what you are looking for) because of their large eyes and large bodies. Did you know that the male bee dies after mating with the queen? His member gets stuck inside the queen during the act and then he falls to the ground to die. I circled a drone from our new hive (hive two).

Our new queen has been busy laying eggs. You can see a nurse bee tending to the eggs in the picture below. Can you believe the bees have done all of this in five days? Bees are excellent creatures.

Our old hive (hive one) seems to have less bees than the new hive, but appears to be healthy and increasing in numbers. Here is a picture of my nephew Owen checking out hive one for the first time.

An Easter Swarm

Have you ever seen a swarm of bees? Before this evening we hadn't and yet Glenn still seemed to think it would be a piece of cake to remove a swarm and take it home. He read about it in a book. How difficult could it be?

Rebecca, a fellow SLO County Mommy, emailed me to tell me about another Mommy who had a swarm of bees fly across her yard this afternoon. The bees conveniently landed on a trellis, five feet above the ground.

You would have thought Glenn won the lottery when I told him about the swarm. Glenn has been waiting and waiting for our neighbor's bees to swarm so he could add another hive. Glenn had all of his supplies in the truck in minutes and we headed out to Paso Robles to try to pick up the swarm.

I have to give Glenn credit, he looks like a professional. I think he was made to keep bees!

Chicken Drama

I’m fortunate to have a somewhat uneventful life currently. No births, deaths, moving, divorce, job losses, or family drama. See, I’ve got nothing and it’s harder to blog when things are pretty boring all of the time. This is the reason I live vicariously through my chickens. My chickens have it all-new chicks, sex with multiple partners, hawks trying to kill them, a rooster who loves one son and hates another, and brothers fighting to the death. And all of this happened today.

Carlos our oldest and most aggressive rooster is the proud father of two sons and a daughter. The relationship he has with his children is, well, weird. For instance, this evening he watched his son copulate with his daughter before he decided he wanted a piece of the action. It all makes me want to vomit. I guess chickens don’t quite see family relationships the way we do.

This post is actually about the complex relationship between Carlos and his sons Eddie and Clumsia. Carlos and Clumsia get along well and work together taking care of the hens. They also would both like to see Eddie dead. Eddie is a goofy, gentle rooster, the kind of rooster I like. Eddie has been sequestered away from the rest of the flock since we noticed his foot was injured. We have five new chicks almost ready to join the group, so we decided we would let Eddie take care of them. Glenn let all of the chickens out today in order to set up two separate hen houses. I noticed Oliver transfixed on something he was watching outside as I tried to get him to eat yogurt. I asked him what he was looking at and he said, “They are attacking!”

Poor Eddie was being beaten down by Clumsia. You can see the damage done to Eddie’s comb and wattle. Eddie now has a nice wing of the hen house and his chicks moved in this afternoon. We hope our outcast rooster finds a little bit of happiness with his own group.

This is a picture of Eddie's new family a few weeks ago. Honey, Bea, Last and Georgie are in the picture.

A Boy and his Dog

I can't believe I haven’t yet blogged about Oliver’s best friend, Pumpkin. Pumpkin came into our lives one fresh fall morning in October 2007. Glenn woke me up saying, “Honey there is a Pit Bull on our doormat.” Back then we lived in a barn on a sheep ranch- we were used to finding all kinds of animals on our doormat. Pumpkin was thin, hyper and pooping acorns (not to mention the funny blink that he had). It took us ten minutes to realize he belonged with our family.

I made a meager effort to find Pumpkin’s previous owner, knowing he was probably dumped out in the middle of nowhere. After a few weeks of caring for Pumpkin, it became obvious why he was dumped. Pumpkin was not neutered and while he looks fierce, he has a heart of honey. He was also raised without any sort of obedience training and his huge frame frequently barreled into me or Oliver, knocking us down. Pumpkin also was in need of an expensive eye surgery (the reason for his blinking).

I have to admit, it is hard for me to like Pumpkin at times. And I know it will get easier as he matures. He frequently takes off (Oliver like to let him outside to play with the dogs across the street), chews up grandma’s quilt, or lifts his leg on me during a walk.

Don’t feel bad for Pumpkin. Pumpkin will forever be loved deeply and unconditionally by his favorite human, Oliver.

Bee Inspection (3/28/09)

We opened up the hive this weekend to find all of the things we we hoping to find: honey storage, new brood and our queen. There should be quite an explosion in our bee population in the next couple of weeks. We are also patiently waiting for our neighbor's bees to swarm so we can start a second hive. Steve and Floyd (the neighbors) have been keeping bees for years, but do not harvest honey. They enjoy having bees in their large vegetable garden. You can see our queen easily in the photo below.

The bees love the wildflowers that have recently bloomed.

Here are a couple of our ladies getting a drink.

The Chicken Experiment- Final Results!

This is the final chapter of the chicken experiment. Please see our previous post if you need to catch up.
The Beneficial Bee: The Chicken Experiment Continued
I should go back to the beginning to tell this story correctly. Our chicken experiment started last fall when our hen Etta seemed determined to become a Mother. We drew a small X on four eggs, two blue and two brown. Glenn built Etta the most amazing birthing house where 21 days later, three chicks hatched. One egg completely disappeared. Two of those chicks turned into grey versions of their Plymouth Rock father, and one had unusual coloring (Clumsia). We figured Clumsia was half Ameraucana (a blue egg-laying chicken) because she had such interesting coloring. The other two chickens, one rooster and one hen, we thought were of the brown egg laying variety. We gave up hope of having new green eggs last weekend when our only hope, Clumsia, started crowing. On Tuesday Glenn went to collect the eggs and found the cutest little green egg- a tiny egg that only a teenager chicken would lay.

Our sweet (and slightly bland looking) hen Lupe is the new green egg layer. We spent most of the day waiting for her to lay an egg in order to confirm this information. Lupe’s eggs are almost exactly the same shade of green as our adult Ameraucana, as you can see in the above picture.

What a wonderful, unusual hen! Here is a picture of Otter watching Lupe. Otter loves hanging with the chickens too.

A bee stung Oliver yesterday. It crawled into his slipper and stung his ankle. Oliver said, “Ouch.” That was it. I asked him later if he still liked the bees and he said, “Yeah, they make honey for us.”

Oliver also takes some pretty nice photographs with his Kidizoom camera he received from his Grammy and Pop for Christmas. For every twenty blurry photos, he captures one of these. I know I’m biased, but I think he needs his own art show.
"Horsie"
"Crabs!"
"Us Going for a Ride at the Beach"
"Lobster"
"Chickens"

The Chicken Experiment Continued

Some of you may remember our chicken experiment where we crossed our Plymouth Rock rooster with an Ameraucana hen.
The Beneficial Bee: The Chicken Experiment
We have been waiting patiently for our hen Clumsia (another pet named by Oliver) to start laying eggs. Clumsia is the offspring of a chicken breed who lays brown eggs with a breed that lays blue. I was hoping for some sort of amazing blue spotted brown egg. Here she is-our beautiful hen.

Recently things started getting interesting. Clumsia began trying to mate with the other hens. Still deep in denial, Glenn and I agreed that we were thrilled to have a gay hen.

My dream of cool eggs faded more every day as Clumsia began acting like a male. Glenn still held out hope that she was a female and we had daily discussions comparing her female attributes to her male features. Could it be that we had a transgender chicken?

Then we heard it. And finally we had our answer. Below you can see a picture of our rooster Clumsia crowing.

Bee Update

I am officially a beekeeper now and not just the photographer. Glenn and I switched roles today as I felt ready to take on the challenge of opening the hive. I tried to keep my nerves under control as I put on my bee hat and gloves. As I puffed smoke into the top of the hive, the sound of a thousand bees buzzing filled the air. Bees are gentle. I had to remind myself of that fact every couple of seconds. And they were. We inspected the top portion of the hive and could not find our old queen. There was a little bit of honey storage but no brood. We decided to remove the queen excluder (separating the top hive from the bottom hive). The bottom portion of the hive was filled with brood and a few open queen cells. Glenn is assuming we have a new queen and she is establishing herself. After I realized the bees were not going to attack me, I started to enjoy watching them work. We even saw a bee doing a “bee dance” which we have yet to see (or recognize) on the outside of the hive.


We also found our bees on our pluot tree today! Its flowers smell like sweet tarts so I am not surprised our bees were able to find it. Glenn is thrilled because our fruit trees have to be cross pollinated.