Don't you just love wildlife

Just starting the new year check on hives, no survival figures yet, but found woodpecker damage on my stored supers.

In periods of cold weather they can do a lot of damage to live colonies, it seems that the disturbance can kill the colony. Here though they or it have attacked empty (of bees) boxes, what they were looking for I don't know. Perhaps they had a go a t the live colonies but the incumbents persuaded them to move on.

Someone told me that the noise you here from wood peckers in the spring is to attract mates rather than find food, perhaps they have been testing out the acoustic qualities of my hives.Here another classic woodpecker damage were they attempt to enlarge the entrance, to get at the inside, an empty box again though.

The damage was done in Jan and since then no further problem, presumably they didn't find anything worthwhile.

Well that's a surprise

We weren't expecting that, we bought three ewes in late October and put them to our tup, expecting lambs around april. Well they must have been in lamb as two were born yesterday, one died the other seems fine, a nice little ewe. We gave her a little mac and brought her in to get warm, sleeping well. Lambs always seem quite at home in our kitchen and are relaxed as long as the Rayburn is on.

We gave her some extra chlorostrum and put her back with Mum.


As soon as we are happy thet she isfeeding well we'll put them out in the orchard.
Unfortunately we lost one of our best ewes due to calcium deficiency, as we didn't know she was carrying a lamb at such a late stage so had not started feeding her up.

So a good day and a bad day.