May part 3 ups and downs

OK here's the last part of the May newsletter :) as you have all more than likely read over my numerous blog posts life at the warren is very busy at times and the month of May has been no different lol. We have Kim's brother staying with us for a while which is always strange when we have someone else living with us.... not that its a problem in anyway its just that i seem to be consuming more alcohol than i used to...well you have to be sociable when you have guests (grin) anyway i digress :) as mentioned in the last blog we have come back into the rabbit fancy with the help of a very good friend Darren, Kim's mini lops are back in the shed with a new project in the pipe line chocolate harlequin's which she is very excited about. As seen in the pictures i have my rare breeds again so looking forward to promoting and working with them :) with more rabbits we obviously needed more hutch space so the last of our hutches arrived mid May and all stock moved to their new accommodations.

it all looks really nice now, although our old shed was brilliant considering we made it entirely from scraps of wood, this is so much easier for Kim...a myself obviously :). The mini lop bucks have the hutches to the right, the does to the left with my rare breeds at the bottom and around the corner. It has an alarm system (came with the shed) extractor fan, automatic pest control and is fully insulated which we noticed helped the rabbits considerably when we actually had some hot weather. So the shed is finished, just waiting for some stock i'm picking up in june for another project in the pipeline (another story...) and litters running on so we can start showing again :).
Our Good friend Darren came over one weekend and ended up watching a scene at the bottom of the garden which made him late getting home lol but he wanted to see the outcome..?? let me explain :)
we have 2 bee hives at the bottom of the garden, both are very different in personalities and production...its my fault as i need to keep a regular eye on them and after our last check and taking away some of the honey we left them to long. With the weather being bad the bee's needed to get out and about....and boy did they, we ended up with a swarm, now not having the space to put it anywhere we called a bee keeper to collect the swarm which he did and i helped him...all the while Kim & Daren sat watching the whole show :) the hive that was causing problems we decided to check and found.....14 queen cells at varying stages including some with queens emerging as we were watching!! Anyway to cut a long story short we sorted the hive leaving one virgin queen behind. The next day we checked the second hive which luckily was ok and only had a couple of queen cells, so that was it....or so we thought, we had another swarm turn up...which wasn't ours and that was duly taken away, the next couple of days Kim, Karl and myself got attacked in the garden where ever we were including the dogs....so on advice we sealed the hive up as we cannot have aggresive bee's in the garden especially with our neighbours and our grandchildren.
They have been persistant buggers and it took over a week b4 we were able to open and clean out the hive ready for next year. So everythings OK you ask me....haa! we checked the other hive to take the next lot of honey...and its queenless no eggs, no brood so we are back to square one lol so today i have ordered a new queen which should turn up tomorrow  and we can start all over again :) so thats part 3 bee problems, lots of rabbits and crappy weather lol but i'm sure June will be something else entirely so until then...l8rs bloggers