The Chook Feed (Blog)

Roll away nests have proved to be a hit in Australia

It is interesting to see how many sheds for small home flocks of just a few layers or a few bantams have a tray sitting on the perches for a nest. Roll away nest boxes help keep your eggs cleaner and safer. The normal rule of thumb for chicken nest boxes is one chook nest for 5 birds. Many backyard poultry keepers will need only one nest box. We can help with rollaway nest boxes to suit up to 50 birds, or indeed more.

Nest Boxes with rollaway eggs allow the eggs to stay clean, stop chooks eating their own eggs, stop crows etc from stealing eggs, keep the egg cleaner. We have a wide range of chicken nesting boxes, and almost all include rollaway egg functions.

This encourages the birds to sleep in the nest at night. The birds excrete 40% of their manure at night and this ends up in the nest. The result: dirty eggs.

Placement

Made of thick quality plastic, they are easy to clean, easy to mount, and ideal for the mini flock. When mounting nests it is essential that the nests be lower in height than the perches. This is so hens will be reluctant to sleep in the nests. The nests will be left closed when the birds are young, before they come in to lay. So the birds will learn to perch at night. If the nest is to be placed near the perches, it is a good idea to make an anti-perch plate so birds will not perch on top of the nests at night.

Always mount the nest below and away from the perches (or make sure you lock the nest box EVERY night). Always close the nest when you have young birds before the commencement of lay. Train the birds to perch so they will not sleep in the nest. If the birds might perch on top of the nest, tack a piece of metal or wood above the nest so they cannot perch on the nest.

Perches are higher than the nesting box so it remains clean.

We at Bellsouth have always provided information to Australians trying to encourage people to get into chooks. This ranged from a onsite print press in the 1980's, a backyard poultry club before the internet existed and during a time when keeping chickens was definetly a pastime for farmers, fanciers and poor people, it was definetly not a pastime of urban dwellers at that time. Much has changed but one thing hasn't Bellsouth still provides information. This information is largely solid and doesn't change with trends or whats may be selling online or what people think is a funky new product. Chickens and poultry need the same things as ever.

Good access to clean quality food and water (not just grass and scraps), good accommodation (an ongoing issue), well considered equipment such as feeders and chicken drinkers , installed in the correct places to enable a peaceful flock and clean eggs. Bellsouth is naturally involved with incubation of eggs, from export to China of large scale, Bellsouth made and designed (yes in Australia) incubators in the 1990s to making our own small incubator for 35 years, again here in Australia. We also made an app to help people globally track their incubation batches and understand incubation and chicken raising neccessities more. We also import quality goods from a wide range of manufacturers world wide, we don't tend to buy gear and re-label it, trying to imply we made it. If we do make it we say so, if not, we are clear where things come from. People may notice Bellsouth gear is not the absolute cheapest on the market, that's because it is highly likely it is not the cheapest gear in Australia, that is not our goal, poultry deserve better than this and so do our customers, we focus of gear that does the job and lasts. We are interested in sustainability( poultry being an important part of this) and cheap gear most often does not meet quality and sustainability expectations we have. 

But back, to information we supply, please check it out, most is downloadable and printable but it may not look mega funky, however it is a collection of real information on poultry.

Here we will try a blog on the eshop again, after a rebuild. We have had a Blog before but it seemed superflous given we have a large section on information pages on two websites for example:

Bellsouth Information pages on our eshop

and

Bellsouth Resources on our information webpages

and 

News feeds in relation to poultry internationally and Australia wide, and a separate Blog.

Thanks, from Simon