Not really a repair, more a complete rebuild given that the metal cover and the sheet of plywood underneath it were the only things that were worth keeping, but this morning I finished gluing/nailing it all together so now there’s one more usable roof in the store.
It may only be scraping 5°C outdoors, but the Sun is shining and bees are on the move, foraging for water in the condensation on the tank we use to catch rain from the roof of my father-in-law’s greenhouse.
And on a Viburnum.
This evening I finished gluing together the new sides of the first of four beehive roofs that I have to repair.
It doesn’t look too bad I think, considering the lump of scrap that I started with.
Hopefully tomorrow I can get it all reassembled.
The closure of a local bridge to, well, almost anywhere really, meant that the shortest two alternative routes (at least for small vehicles) took be past almost all of the hives that I hadn’t yet visited so far this Spring, so it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.
Most of the colonies seem to be doing well, but sadly there was one disappointment. The colony that I tried to rescue from a cavity in a tree branch that had been cut down didn’t make it through the Winter. Not the most enormous surprise as it was very awkward trying to get them to leave the cavity, but it’s a shame I couldn’t have done better with them.
Lidl’s finestcheapest this time around, as an experiment to see how it comes out. Mature and “normal”. It feels a bit “rubbery”, but perhaps that will change once the cheese is smoked and has had a bit of time for the flavour to develop.
As it went into the smoker:
And after three-ish hours:
I’ll give it 24 hours wrapped in greaseproof paper, then vacuum seal it and leave it for five weeks for the flavour to develop.
There were about eight decent spears ready to harvest, so my wife had them all with boiled eggs for lunch today. I can live with missing out this time around. She’s away next week, so I’ll have them all to myself then 😀
I want to use the space and there’s very little actual broccoli left on the plants (in fact the bees have done a pretty good job of pollinating most of them by the looks of it), so today I decided to pull up almost all of the purple sprouting broccoli. It was late this year, but has done well nonetheless and we’ve had quite a few meals from it. I did find a couple of plants that were still lagging behind the others and may have a few edible shoots left, so I left those for later in the week. If we don’t eat them this week then they’ll be coming out too.
A quote in the papers today from the Barcelona football team goalkeeper:
There’s so much money in this world and there’s no money for what’s most important.
What is he talking about? Child poverty? Dealing with famine? Climate change? Stopping domestic violence? The war in Ukraine?
No, no, no. Don’t be silly. It’s installing goal line technology for La Liga.
How could you not have guessed?
One of the awkward things about the smoke generator for my smoker is that it’s quite awkward to get the tea light in and out to get it burning. One workaround is to put a screw through the side of the tea light to act as a handle, but the holders are now getting so thin that there’s really no support there. So I endeavoured to make my own.
I started with a bit of scrap zinc-coated steel sheet that I cut and bent into a vague “spoon” shape.
That fits the candle nicely, though it does get a bit hot once the tea light has been burning for a while.
A bit of dowel, a saw cut or two and some sanding and I also have a “handy” handle.
This makes life so much easier when starting the smoker. Everyone should have one. Preferably bought from me at hideous expense 😀
After getting through other stuff today I thought I’d push on with a few things in the workshop to try to clear a bit more space.
First up was turning some old frames from which I’d recovered the wax ages ago into foundationless frames. That was pretty trivial, but at least means the frames are now hanging in the roof of my bee shed ready to be used rather than cluttering up the workshop.
Then I took a pile of old top bars and cleaned the loose junk and “lumpy bits” off them so the wider part of the sides were relatively smooth.
And then paired them up, ready to be glued together.
Finally I spread glue on the wider sides and clamped them together as pairs, using some weights to stop the entire lot “bowing” upwards.
There are ten of these pairs and they’ll form the tops of my next set of ten insulated “fat” dummies, but for now they’re sitting in the workshop overnight whilst the glue dries.
