Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (40 page)

NEVER KEEP JUST ONE HEN.
Chickens need to be part of a flock for their psychological well-being. Three or four hens is a good number for a small backyard coop. Roosters are illegal in most urban and suburban settings and unnecessary unless you want to breed chicks. Hens lay eggs whether or not a rooster is present.

CHICKENS ARE RACISTS.
Or rather, shape-ists. While we know people who keep mixed flocks successfully, our own experience and that of others tells us that if any chicken is shaped different from the others, the dominant chickens in the flock may decided to harass it ruthlessly. This doesn’t mean they all have to be the same breed—many breeds have the same general shape. For instance, our Rhode Island Red and Plymouth Rocks are the same shape and get along well, but they all pick on our Americauna, which has
(had!)
long tail feathers. The others—all of which have stubby tails—rip her tail feathers out as fast as they can grow.

FEED THEM CHICKEN FEED.
Our
DIY
ethos does not extend so far that we make our own chicken feed. Laying hens have intense nutritional needs, because they’ve been engineered to lay eggs at an astonishing rate. While it is possible to make your own chicken feed, if you fail to meet their nutritional needs, the results can range from reduced laying to laying soft-shelled eggs, which is dangerous for the hen. Just save yourself the trouble and buy high-quality organic feed formulated for laying hens. Supplement the feed with lots of fresh vegetables and whole grains.

Provide the feed in a poultry feeder, not on the floor. You don’t want the birds gobbling up their own poop along with the feed. Poultry feed attracts rodents, so consider putting the feeder away at night. The chickens usually make sure there isn’t any feed left on the ground, but a full feeder is an all-night buffet for mice. After noticing mice around our henhouse, we started taking our feeder out of the coop at night when we lock up the chickens. We place it in a small, lidded trash can until the next morning.

GIVE THEM LOTS OF FRESH WATER.
Constant access to fresh water is critical to good health. Don’t place the water in a dish. Invest in a poultry fountain, a device that dispenses clean water a little at a time. Keep it off the ground, so the water doesn’t become clogged with dirt and straw. A fountain can either be set on a pile of bricks or suspended from the roof of the run.

KEEP THEM ENTERTAINED.
To prevent chickens from causing mischief—like beating each other up—keep them busy. A chicken’s motto is “I scratch, therefore I am.” While their feed should be kept in an elevated feeder to keep it clean, we scatter handfuls of chicken scratch or whole grains in the run to give them something to hunt. Line the run with hay or dead leaves, any dry organic matter to provide them plenty of material to scratch through. Give them fresh greens whenever possible. We feed them weeds we’ve pulled, trimmings from the garden, bugs from the garden, and scraps from the kitchen. When we go to the farmers’ market, we beg boxes of green trimmings from the vendors and toss those in the coop as a special treat. A whole apple can entertain chickens for a good while, as can a head of lettuce. If they don’t have an area to free range, an hour or so of supervised play in the yard is thrilling to them and pretty fun for onlookers, too.

PRACTICE THE DEEP-BEDDING METHOD.
While the inside of the henhouse should be cleaned out at least once a week, the run itself doesn’t have to be cleaned if you follow the deep-bedding method. As suggested above, line the run with about a foot of straw (or other dry organic material, like dead leaves). Deep bedding not only gives the birds lots of material to search through, it also absorbs their waste. As they scratch, they break down their own manure, mixing it with the straw to make compost. Bits of green waste that they don’t consume—like stalks and rinds—also get absorbed into the compost. The upshot is that the run does not smell or look unsightly, the chickens are happy, and you don’t have to muck out the run. Just keep adding fresh material as the old stuff gets broken down. About once a year, we go in and harvest the coop compost and transfer it to one of our compost piles. After harvesting, we put down a thick layer of fresh straw and let the cycle begin again.

DEEP-CLEAN THE HENHOUSE IN THE SPRING AND THE FALL.
Twice a year, give the henhouse a thorough cleaning. Keeping it clean will help prevent parasite infestations. Scrub down all surfaces and expose them to sun, if you can. Some people use bleach and water, but we use a vinegar water, about 2 cups white vinegar per bucket of hot water. Leave the house open to dry out. After it dries, we apply a thick coating of linseed oil to the wooden surfaces. All the wood in our henhouse is unfinished plywood, with the exception of the roost, which is a tree branch. When the house was first built, we saturated the wood inside the house with as much linseed oil as it could absorb. This is an old-fashioned method of preventing parasites, like mites, from taking refuge in the pores of the wood. Actually, the old-fashioned method calls for crank shaft oil, but we don’t have a lot of that around here. The oil treatments have worked for us so far. During the deep cleans, we apply a fresh coat of oil with a rag to all wood surfaces, including the roosting bar and the laying box, then use a dry cloth to wipe up any excess oil. We do this early in the morning, so the house can stand open and air out all day long.

WARNING

Oil-soaked rags can spontaneously combust. Don’t pile them up or leave them sitting on or near flammable items. Hang them out on a line to dry, or seal them in a metal can.

IF A CHICKEN GETS SICK,
isolate it from the others as soon as you notice something is wrong. A sick chicken will stand around idle while the others are busy, often with its feathers puffed up. Look for signs of disease, like discharge from the beak or a dirty bottom. Chickens don’t have much defense against disease. Someone once told us, “Chickens have two settings: on and off.” Meaning they’re either well or they’re dead, and they usually go fast. A sick hen might pull through if you isolate her, keep her warm, and give her
TLC
, but often there is nothing you can do. A trip to the vet is expensive, and city vets don’t usually know much about chickens. For this reason prevention is the cure—and it’s simple, too. Give them good food, lots of water, fresh air and sunshine, clean bedding, and room to exercise. Most health problems arise from poor management. If you get new chickens, keep them isolated from your existing flock for a couple of weeks to make sure they’re not carrying any diseases.

IF A CHICKEN HAS AN OPEN WOUND,
isolate the bird quickly from the other chickens. They will peck at the wound and make it worse. Wash the wound and put antibiotic cream on it. Keep her warm and safe indoors and protected from flies, which may lay eggs in the wound. To help her heal faster, feed the hen extra protein, like worms, tuna, or scraps of cooked meat.

IF YOU PLAN TO EAT THEM, DON’T NAME THEM.
And raise a flock of the same breed of chickens, so they all look alike. It’s much easier to consider them dinner if you don’t consider them as individuals.

Backward Beekeeping

Bees are the new chickens. Over the past few years, backyard chicken keeping has enjoyed a renaissance among self-reliant urbanites and suburbanites. We predict beekeeping will be the next big thing. A beehive is a time-honored and useful addition to any working garden. Honeybees not only provide vital pollination services, they also provide a home with organic, raw honey for the table and beeswax for salves, lotion, and candles. Beyond that, a hive is a powerful and enigmatic force that adds what we can only describe as a spiritual presence to the garden. We don’t really keep bees, we host them, honor them, and learn from them.

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Getting Started with Beekeeping

Honeybees are in trouble. You’ve probably heard the reports of colony collapse disorder (
CCD
), the malady that is destroying the commercial beekeeping industry. Their fate seems to weigh on our collective consciousness. And it should. The plight of honeybees is emblematic of the plight of the natural world as a whole. We believe human interference-including the widespread use of insecticides and the management techniques of professional beekeepers—is to blame for their decline. The reason we believe this is because feral bee populations are quite healthy. When left to their own devices, bees do okay. So how do you keep bees, yet not interfere with them? You become a “backward beekeeper.”

Natural beekeeper Charles Martin Simon coined the phrase “beekeeping backwards.” Simon sums up his approach by saying, “Work with Nature, not against Her.” We learned about Simon and the backward methodology from our own beekeeping mentor, Kirk “Kirkobeeo” Anderson, leader of Los Angeles’s pioneering beekeeping club, Backwards Beekeepers. Backward beekeeping is founded on principles that fly in the face of established beekeeping practice. The overriding principle is Kirk Anderson’s watchwords: “Let the bees be bees.”

Until you delve into the world of beekeeping, you’d never guess how heavy-handed normal beekeeping practice is toward the bees. Laying it all out would be a book in itself, but in broad strokes, humans have been trying to increase honey production by micromanaging the bees. We force them to build large comb to breed large bees. We control the ratio of male bees to female bees. We don’t let the hive create its own queens, we import them, preseminated. We limit the queen’s movements within the hive. The list goes on and on. The upshot is that kept bees are frail bees. They are particularly vulnerable to a parasite called the varroa mite. To “protect” bees against mites and other problems, beekeepers spray hives with all kinds of chemicals. Conventional beekeeping has become an endless treadmill of chemical treatments that, in the end, weaken the bees and strengthen their enemies.

Backward beekeepers manage bees as little as possible. All we ask of the bees is that they use our hive boxes as homes. We peek in the hive once in a while to make sure they have enough room—and, of course, we harvest honey when they have some to spare. Other than that, we don’t interfere in their affairs. Healthy hives manage mite infestations on their own. If they don’t, they die, and we go out and get new bees. This brings us to one of the most important distinctions between backward beekeeping and normal beekeeping. We keep feral bees. Instead of importing delicate European beestock, we capture wild bees. Feral bees are smaller than their commercial counterparts and much hardier. They’re proven survivors, well adapted to your local climate and conditions.

WHAT ABOUT AFRICAN BEES?

As far as we’re concerned, fear of “Africanized” wild bees is overblown. Much of it is hype fostered by government agencies and exterminating businesses. Yes, an aggressive strain of bees imported from Africa was loosed in Brazil in the 1950s. Yes, they’ve been working their way north ever since. But all along the way, they’ve been interbreeding with gentle local bees. We live in Los Angeles, far enough south that our feral bee population is certainly Africanized. To us, this just means our bees are strong and productive, because those are also traits of these dreaded bees. We’ve not found them to be particularly aggressive. They’re not pussycats—you do have to wear protective gear when handling them—but their evil reputation is undeserved.

Another radical difference in this style of beekeeping is that we allow the bees to shape their own comb. Man-made beehives are wooden boxes filled with frames that sit in the boxes like hanging files. The bees build their comb in these frames instead of in freeform shapes, as they would in nature. This structure allows beekeepers to pull out frames, inspect them, rearrange them, and harvest honey. Backward beekeepers use frames, too, but the frames are put into the hive empty, save for a narrow wax strip at the top called a “starter strip.” Standard beekeeping practice provides the bees with frames filled with a preformed comb stamped out of wax or plastic. This is called
foundation.
The theory behind this is that the less time the bees spend building their home, the more time they’ll spend making honey. The foundation dictates how large each cell of the honeycomb will be. The purpose of this is twofold. First, it encourages the production of larger bees—jumbo bees that make more honey—because the size of the cell an egg is laid in dictates the size of the bee, and man-made cells are larger than bees would make on their own. The second purpose is to limit the number of drones a hive makes.

Drones, male bees, are bred in larger cells than female bees. Preformed foundation provides only so many drone-size cells, artificially limiting their numbers. From a human perspective, drones are useless. They don’t make honey. They don’t do anything at all except inseminate new queens. Therefore, in our infinite wisdom, humans decided to cap the number of drones per hive. Backward beekeepers let the bees decide their own gender ratios. It just makes sense—and there’s some evidence to prove that the bees know best. One thing we know is that mites prefer to invade drone cells. If they’re bothering drones, they are not infesting the more critical worker bee cells.

All of this is to say that we believe that bees should be the size they want to be, and they should manage their own gender ratios and build their own home. For this reason we give them empty frames. They build comb in the frames to their own specifications, but they do shape it within the frames, so we can manipulate the hive when we need to.

To recap, if you want to be a backward beekeeper, you do the following:

• Keep feral bees.
  
• Allow them to build their own comb in empty frames.
  
• Never spray them with anything to treat mites, not even “natural” remedies, like powdered sugar.
  
• Always let bees be bees.
  

Assembling Your Beekeeping Equipment

PREPARATION:
3 hours

Preparation is the first step. Have all of the following equipment collected, assembled, set up, and in place before you acquire your bees. The supplies listed below can be found at any beekeeping supply store or online retailer of beekeeping equipment.

YOU’LL NEED

• Hive tool (like a miniature crowbar)
  
• Cheapest smoker you can find. They all work the same.
  
• Protective gear: bee suits (full length) or bee jackets (half length) and long leather or heavy canvas gloves. A full suit or jacket with an integrated hat and veil is best, because there are no gaps at the neckline. But you could buy a separate hat/veil combo and wear it with ordinary heavy clothing, like a sturdy canvas jacket.
  
• Bee brush, which looks a little like a windshield brush (handy but optional)
  

HIVE PARTS:

• Cover (telescoping or migratory cover)
  
• Inner cover (optional, for added insulation)
  
• Bottom board
  
• 2 medium (16 x 20 inches) hive boxes—more boxes as the hive expands
  
• 20 empty hive frames (10 per box) sized to fit the boxes
  

MATERIALS FOR PREPARING THE FRAMES:

• 8-10 ounces organic or cosmetic-grade beeswax. The beeswax could be purchased at the beekeeping supply store.
  
• 30 12-inch wooden stir sticks, the sort used for paint
  
• Wood glue
  
• Cheap paintbrush
  
• Clean tin can
  

IS BACKYARD BEEKEEPING LEGAL?

The answer depends on what city you live in. Check your city code. There’s an encouraging movement afoot to legalize beekeeping in cities where it’s been forbidden. Denver, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and New York City have all legalized it recently, and we hope they’re just the start of the wave. Get involved and support beekeeping in your own city. If beekeeping is illegal where you live, all we’d say is that beekeeping codes are seldom enforced, and when dealing with city agencies, it’s generally better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

ASSEMBLE THE HIVE AND FRAMES

You can buy the hive boxes and frames preassembled or in pieces. If they’re sold collapsed, assembly instructions will come with them. Don’t buy “everything you need to get started” kits, because those will come with extra parts that you don’t need for backward beekeeping. Buy the pieces separately, as listed on page
273
. You can paint the assembled hive if you wish, but use latex paint and only paint the outer surfaces.

As a backward beekeeper, you’ll have to fit the empty frames with starter strips, because starter stips are not standard equipment. As discussed above, we don’t use frames filled with foundation. We let the bees build their own comb, but we give them some help by putting a narrow wax strip at the top of the empty frame. If you look at the top bar of an empty frame, you’ll see a groove running along the underside of it. Glue a stir stick lengthwise into the groove of each frame to serve as a foundation for the wax. The sticks will be shorter than the length of the frames, so you will need to snap additional sticks into smaller pieces to fill the gaps. The fit does not have to be perfect.

Put the beeswax in a clean tin can, and put that can in a saucepan of gently simmering water. Once the wax is melted, paint both sides of the strips with a coat of beeswax. Be sure to dab some along the groove to help hold the strips securely. The beeswax will set up as soon as it cools. Hang the frames in the boxes, 10 per box.

SET UP THE HIVE

To ensure happy bees, position the hive so that it receives morning sun. The bees need that warmth to get going. Beyond that, the hive should be sited in a remote corner where there’s not a lot of human traffic. A side yard is an ideal spot. Bees will be coming and going from the hive all day long. They usually approach from high and land at a steep angle, and they head straight up when they take off. As long as there’s a clear space of about 5 feet in front of the hive, you won’t often cross their flight path. But if you find that they’ve established a flight pattern that interferes with your routines (say they’re flying right over your garden bed), don’t be afraid to put up a standing trellis or screen near the hive to subtly reroute traffic. When they come across an obstacle like a screen or fence, they fly straight up the face of the obstacle, and then continue in whatever direction they wish to go.

The hive should not sit on the ground. Elevate it to coffee-table height to deter casual intrusions by skunks and other critters. But more important, bees need protection from ants. Ants love honey, and bees under attack from ants will often pack up and leave. For this reason, there needs to be an ant moat around the hive. The easiest way to do this is to put the hive on a footed table or stand. (Make sure the table is sturdy. As the hive grows, it will become heavy, perhaps as much as 200 pounds.) Sink each foot of the table in a can—a tuna can is enough, though you could use a deep can, like a tomato can—filled with oil of any kind: cheap cooking oil, motor oil, whatever you have. Make sure there are no other access routes available to ants. Trim away foliage that touches the hive, for instance. Even tall grass can become an ant bridge.