Do hens need a rooster to lay eggs?

Some of the questions I get asked the most are about having roosters and eggs. People always want to know if I have roosters and can hens lay eggs without them? I really do understand not wanting roosters, they're loud and sometimes mean. They're also unnecessary if all you want your hens for is to produce eating eggs.

Now obviously if you want them to produce hatching eggs then you'll need a rooster to fertilize those eggs. Well, he actually fertilizes the hen but that's a story for further down in this post. For now, let's stick with egg production.

What to do with old hens?

When a flock of laying hens gets older, they don't lay eggs as often. Around the time they are 2 years old, most hens stop laying the 6 eggs a week they were producing up till now and the amount they lay will decline each year. They usually drop down to 1 or 2 eggs a week by 6 years old.

What do you do at that point? This is especially concerning if you have a small coop in a suburban backyard which has rules about how many hens you're allowed to have. Do you really want 6 hens that are barely laying?

I've heard people say this when their hens stop laying: "I won't eat them. I would like to find a place that will take them and let them live out the rest of their lives." In fact, that exact sentence was clipped from a discussion a bunch of us were having in a chicken group!

Which is exactly what prompted this post.

Beet juice to keep chickens water from freezing!

A few weeks ago I saw something on tick tock that did not sounded interesting to me. Somebody was claiming that if you put a little bit of beet juice in your chicken's waterer, that it wouldn't freeze in winter! Now I found this pretty hard to believe and actually reached out to ask questions but never got any answers. 

So I decided to experiment on this myself.

For the last few weeks I have been adding beet juice to all my non-heated font waterers just to see if it would actually keep the water from freezing. It didn't. 

But then I started thinking about that saltwater thing people did about 8 years back. It didn't really work to keep water from freezing, but it did help it to take a little longer to freeze for some people. 

So I decided to do an experiment using 2 bottles of plain water. One I left alone and the other I removed 1Tbs of water and replaced it with 1 Tbs of beet juice. I placed them outside on a day that was between 15° F and 20° F. 

If it's colder or warmer when you use this obviously your solution will freeze faster or more slowly, so take that into account. I did this experiment to figure out precise expectations because this would be great to use in chicks water bottles because they do not have heaters available. 

Can chickens eat June bugs?

The last few weeks here in Pennsylvania we have been dealing with a massive amount of June bugs. My chicken's couldn't be happier. I started noticing it when I left a bucket outside overnight. It had a bit of water in it and it just happened to be on the ground under the garage door light. In the morning it was full of June bugs!

I decided to pour the whole thing into my chickens water bowl to see if they'd eat the bugs and they gobbled up every single one!

That's how I found out that chickens can eat June bugs!
But I started thinking if they are okay for chickens to eat? Is there any harm chickens eating june bugs? Are they too big? Will chickens choke on a bug that big?

Does a chicken run need a roof?

Somebody recently asked me if their chicken run needed a roof and I realized I hadn't really talked about this very much. Today I want to talk about run roofs, if you need one and the different types of materials they can be made with.

All of my chicken runs have roofs of one type or another, even though one of them is only net. I firmly believe in protecting chickens as much as possible in their own coop and run, for both their safety and my sanity. So let's talk about the different types of run roofs.