As I mentioned in an earlier Content Challenge post, my husband and I listed an efficiency apartment on Airbnb almost 6 years ago. As hosts, we’ve discovered both pros and cons of utilizing Airbnb or another vacation rental platform. Through our contact with hundreds of guests, we’ve also learned what Airbnb guests appreciate. Today's Content (Marketing) Challenge shares those discoveries. ​

In addition to an old dog, we keep a small flock of backyard chickens. Actually, we keep only hens. Roosters are too noisy for our 3/4-acre lot with homes around it; most real roosters aren't like Foghorn Leghorn. They don't wait patiently until dawn to crow. Instead, they are apt to sound off before dawn, after dawn, and several times throughout the day. That's hard on neighbors. 

​​Fresh eggs taste better. 
Remember last summer when you sliced a homegrown tomato and added a piece to your sandwich? If it was fresh-picked, you probably noted how much better it tasted than the one you purchased in the grocery store. The contrast between a fresh egg and a store-bought egg isn't as stark, but it's there. Fresh eggs taste better. 

Fresh eggs are much . . . fresher.  Duh, but hear me out. By law, farmers have up to 30 days to get an egg from the hen that laid it to the egg carton. Once in the carton, the egg can be sold for up to 30 days. So, if you pick up a dozen eggs with a "Use By" date just a few days away, you could be buying eggs that are almost 2 months old! That's part of the reason that fresh eggs taste better. 

Laying hens are treated better in backyard flocks. I'm not trying to bash commercial egg producers. However, the industry has a reputation for keeping hens in tiny, barren cages that barely allow them to stretch their legs or wings. Most backyard flocks have at least a sizeable coop in which the birds can move around. Many--including ours--also have fenced areas outside. As a result, backyard hens live better lives.

Sustainability is a buzzword that's applied to situations both globally and individually. What's the word mean on both levels? How does keeping a small flock of hens in your backyard help you live more sustainably? 

According to a United Nations committee report, global sustainability is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Global sustainability focuses on how nations enact laws that protect or destroy Earth's resources and how responsibly they use those resources.

In contrast, individual sustainability has a down-home flavor focused on what on individuals or families can do to minimize their effect on the environment.  Raising chickens is one aspect of down-home sustainability. Other popular activities include gardening, composting and beekeeping.   

Here are specific ways in which raising backyard chickens helps families live more sustainably:

• Chickens are living compost bins. They love to eat fruit and vegetable peels, grass clippings, and other selected scraps. You don't want to overload their diet with these things, but you can significantly reduce the number of food scraps that you put in the garbage.
• Chickens produce fertilizer. Chicken manure makes excellent fertilizer for your garden. It contains lots of nitrogen as well as moderate amounts of potassium and phosphorus. NOTE: You can kill your garden plants if you use it straight, so learn about using chicken manure as fertilizer before you try it. 

Raising chickens teaches children--and adults--valuable life lessons. Here are a few of them:

• Responsibility. Chickens must have food and water every day. They need a clean spot to lay eggs, and they benefit from interaction with people. Someone needs to make sure they have all these things. Young children may need help with waterers or feeders, but they can tend to nesting boxes, gather eggs, and help socialize your flock.
• "Birds and Bees."  I won't go into detail, but raising chickens provides an easy way to teach children why our hens can lay many eggs, but they can't hatch out chicks if we don't keep roosters.  Surprisingly, we've encountered some adults who don't understand this.
• Death is a part of life.  Even though we're careful, we've lost chickens to dogs and raccoons as well as disease and injury.  Death is a part of animal husbandry. It's a hard lesson, especially when we realize that one of our actions inadvertently put our hens at risk. However, we can't eliminate all danger and still allow our flock to live normally.  

If you'd like to learn more about chickens and backyard flocks, I recommend you go to the website for the Murray McMurray Hatchery  and request a free catalog. (The link is at the top right of their homepage.) The catalog contains a wealth of details about chickens and backyard flocks. It is well-written and full of fun photos, too. I read ours from cover to cover every year. 

Here's today's content marketing, no-strings-attached CTA geared to benefit every reader: 
You Accept the CHallenge, Too! If you could start your own little flock, I encourage you to at least consider doing so. Read the sources I've linked. Talk to someone who raises chickens. 

If that's not a possibility, consider buying fresh eggs from a local market or someone you know. You'll pay a little more, but you'll be eating fresh eggs that taste better and are laid by a hen that isn't confined to a cage.  

Watch for tomorrow's Content Challenge. Drop me a comment if you have questions.

It’s early spring. You’re a backyard beekeeper concerned about sustainability and nurturing honey bees. You notice that your beehive has come through the winter safely and that the bees have begun early foraging. The next day as you walk in front of the hive, you don’t see any activity at all. No bees are visible at the opening of the hive. None are visible in the air. With a sinking feeling, you make a mental note to check again a little later in the day.

​Subsequent checks throughout the day yield the same results. The apiary is apparently empty. Every bee has swarmed off. The hive has absconded.​

That’s the million-dollar question. Swarming—when the existing queen and about half of the bees in the hive --leave their apiary and relocate to another home, is a common occurrence. Swarming can be good or bad, depending upon why the hive swarms and whether or not you—as the beekeeper—end up with any viable hives. 
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Ask a dozen beekeepers why swarming occurs, and you’ll get a dozen variations, all of which will contain a few common threads. Here’s the gist of why honeybees leave home.​

One of the biggest causes of swarming is a crowded hive. Swarming most often occurs in early spring, when the new batch of brood are hatching. If bees realize that their current hive is too small to accommodate all the young and everyone else, some of them start looking for a new domicile.

We’re not sure what signals the bees to do this, but at some point, they determine that swarming is going to be necessary. Worker bees prepare a group of fertilized eggs to become queen bees. Before any of these bees hatches, the queen of the existing hive says tally-ho, gathers about half of the hive with her and—literally—buzzes off.

A couple years ago, I saw a swarm flying across the sky about 15 feet above my head. It was remarkable—and noisy! Thousands of honeybees flying in a tight group are an impressive sight. If I had seen where they landed, I’d have made a beeline for them. (Yes, “making a beeline” for something is derived from worker bees flying straight back to the hive on the shortest path once they have a full load of nectar.)

Meanwhile, back at the hive, the baby queens are ready to hatch.  The first one that hatches becomes the queen of the new (smaller) hive. The worker and drone bees carry on their activities in the same hive, which is now much more spacious.

​Even if you can’t locate the swarm that flew off, you now have a hive with a young queen and a functioning group of workers and drones. They have a more spacious home in a location that has previously allowed them to thrive.

If you are fortunate enough to capture the swarming group and relocate it to another of your hives, you’ve gained a hive with a queen you know has been productive. That’s a classic win-win.​

The location just isn’t right.

Like Goldilocks, bees thrive in a situation that’s “just right.” They need abundant food supplies and a consistent source of water. Their home needs to be warm in the winter, but not too warm in the summer. They need ventilation. (If you had thousands of family members living with you, you’d need fresh air, too.) There’s a fine line, though, between too little air and too much. Excessive ventilation or breeze disturbs the brood and can make the hive hard to keep warm in the winter.
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The “neighbors” are bothersome or destructive.
Small pests like hive beetles, mites, ants and other bugs sometimes infest a hive. Wasps and birds can also hinder a hive. Bees that are “worried” by these types of issues often look for a better location.

Animals that eat the bees, or try to rob the hive of honey, can also cause the hive to swarm. Raccoons and opossums enjoy an occasional snack of honeybees. Skunks are an even bigger problem. They love to eat bees and will return to the hive again and again unless they are stopped. And, of course, bears love honey and honeybees. They may attack the hive itself in their effort to get to the honey.​

We didn't start keeping bees as a first step toward urban homesteading or down-home sustainability. We started because our oldest son, Aaron, read that eating local honey was good for people prone to springtime allergies. He was one of those people, and wanted to test the theory with his own honey. (Full disclosure: He was interested in beekeeping before then. The allergy idea was his catalyst.) He read books about beekeeping, then purchased an active hive from a retiring beekeeper. 

The next spring he got a lovely batch of delicious honey and began adding hives. After having some issues with Langstroth hives  (the stacked-box hives most commonly seen in this country), and losing a couple of hives during the winter, Aaron built a horizontal top-bar hive. A top-bar hive looks like a covered manger on stilts. It's a little easier to work with and easier to reach since it sits up off the ground. ​(The photo at the top shows a top-bar hive.)​
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​Shortly after that, Aaron married and moved to Scotland. We inherited his hives and became beekeepers. I can't say that we've been particularly successful as beekeepers. We've harvested more beeswax that we have honey. We learned the hard way that Roundup kills honeybees. We lost two more hives during the winter, and had a couple of hives swarm and move on. That's the bad news. 

There is good news. We have learned much about beekeeping and the importance of helping bees survive in an increasingly difficult environment that includes widespread use of pesticides and potentially-harmful herbicides. As growers of fruit trees, we now understand the delicate balance between keeping the blossoms safe for bees to pollinate, and keeping pests out of the fruit. We're learning the value of bee-friendly pesticides. After a time of seeing very few pollinators in our garden, we now have an abundance of them. 

Beekeeping has also provided some really interesting stories. Twice my husband has successfully captured someone else's hives that had swarmed. The first one settled among the honeysuckle entwined in the chain-link fence at the back of our property.  Michael donned protective gear and began to methodically and carefully extract chunks of bee-encrusted honeysuckle vines. He worked while I stood by snapping pictures and urging him to be careful. Things got intense when he said, "Oh, blast. There's a bee inside my pant leg!" He calmly continued snipping bee-laden vines. The bee apparently decided she'd taken a wrong turn, turned around, and exited the way she had come!

The biggest benefit of beekeeping has been the satisfaction of knowing that we're helping--in a very small way--to stem the tide of drastically-declining numbers of bees in this country. In the process, we have a well-pollinated garden and the joy of watching, and learning about, these fascinating creatures. Occasionally, we also get to taste some of their honey. Beekeeping has been the important first step for us along the road to down-home sustainability.