The Birds and the Bees

Nahhh, this post isn’t going to go as you might think… 

First, the Birds…

The other day when we butchered our last batch of Red Ranger meat birds, we faced a dilemma that we’ve always faced – transporting the birds from the chicken tractor to the temporary “slaughter house” we have set up in the back yard.  In the past, I’ve carried them by hand, walking across the pasture.  I’ve put several of them in buckets and carried them.  I have a friend that got online and downloaded plans for some stackable chicken carrying crates and built them.  Or you can buy the chicken carrying crates, but they are expensive. 

We’re not raising meat birds to sell – just for personal consumption, so I wanted to use something on-hand (so we wouldn’t have to purchase anything), something easy, something cheap and something efficient.  Here’s a simple trick that we used that worked like a charm and met all of the aforementioned requirements.

We have an old wagon that we hook up behind our lawn tractor to haul leaves, sticks, dirt, or whatever we may be hauling.  Could it be used for hauling chickens?  We’re about to find out!  I think the wagon is large enough to carry all 23 birds, but they’ll jump out.  How will we solve this problem?  Well, we have an old pallet laying against the fence that will do the trick, I believe.

Wagon with a makeshift cover

Here is the wagon completely loaded with the pallet pulled over the top:

The slats in the pallet are narrow enough that you have no escapees and big enough that you can peer between the slats and keep an eye on them.

Keeping an eye on the meat birds

Although these birds have lived in a chicken tractor for the last 13 weeks of their lives, they’ll now be transported to the slaughter location by another type of chicken tractor the night before butchering.  This ‘chicken tractor’ is being driven by Benjamin, the driver of the “rooster cruiser.”

A wagon load of meat birds going to slaughter

Then they are off-loaded into a cattle trailer where they will have access to water only as their digestive system is cleared for a cleaner butchering process.

In the cattle trailer for the night

Here is a quick peek at the portable slaughter location we have set up.  We’ve shown this arrangement in previous posts, but looking right to left, you can see the killing cones where the chickens are killed/bled, then the scalding station where they are scalded, then the plucking station where the feathers are removed.  Normally we use the Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker, but we didn’t have access to it this time.  Just to the left of that is where we pull the heads off and cut the feet off.  Then they are lined up on a bench for gutting.  Once gutted they are submerged in buckets of water to cool down prior to freezing.

The Slaughter set-up

Now for the Bees…

For over three years now, we’ve played host to a colony of honeybees that live in a fiberglass column (our ‘columny’ of bees) by the side entrance to our home.  They’ve never stung anyone and we like having a bee hive so that they pollinate our trees and vegetable garden.  Generally they go about their business and we go about ours and we don’t think too much about them.  Every year though, when it warms up, they make their presence known by bearding outside the entrance to their hive in the column

Bee Beard

What is going on?  Well, bearding can be a sign of a strong, healthy colony.  The honey inside is maturing and to keep the honey inside at an optimal temperature, the bees will exit the hive and fan with their wings, forcing air into the hive, helping to regulate temperature.

It could also mean that they’ve run out of room to expand and similar to a family that has out-grown their ‘starter-home,’ they’ll begin looking for a new place.  What we’ve seen in prior years is that the hive will throw off a swarm.  What will happen is that one of the queens will leave the hive, taking with her worker bees.  The new swarm will beard outside like they are doing in the photo above and below and then they’ll take off, usually balling up in a shrub nearby before departing to look for another home.  The bees remaining will stay, no doubt enjoying the extra space that the departing swarm has given them and then with successive hatches, the colony will launch additional swarms.

Bees bearding - cooling down or about to swarm?

Unfortunately we have no way to access the honey in the column.  One of these days I’d like to ask one of my beekeeper friends to capture the colony and put them in a box in the backyard where we’d get the best of both worlds – the pollinating they perform AND the delicious honey they provide.  We also may get more visitors as the bearding by the back door probably suppresses house guests!