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.
I went out to put a super on a hive this morning and to deliver a few (rather late) jars of rent. As I was suiting up two young girls, perhaps five and seven years old, ran to the gate of a nearby house and one excitedly asked “Are you a beekeeper?” before disappearing back indoors.
I sorted the super, dropped off the rent and on the way back past left them with the spare jar I’d brought with me. The chap who answered the door said that he knew a beekeeper who had lost all their colonies this Winter and was desperately upset by it.
Whilst I was at the site I had a bit more of a look around at what the water company have been doing around the pumping station. It’s much more tidy whilst at the same time removing any semblance of privacy for the garden of the adjoining house, but one of the manholes (there are many) has a steady stream of water running out of it. The landowners told me that workers came in when a major water main a couple of miles away was “punctured” during construction work a couple of weeks ago and they had to divert the water otherwise all of Taunton would have been cut off. They’re coming back “some time” to sort everything out, probably with earth-moving machinery, so I need to have a think fairly sharpish about how I’m going to keep the hives out of harm’s way.
The new smoker is now finished, complete with tray for the smoke generator and drip tray to stop food falling onto it.
Time to take it for a test drive!
I’m starting to back up jobs in the workshop… I brought home another two roofs I’d replaced today so now I have four to be repaired. They all need new sides. I’m sure I have some offcuts of cedar gravel boards that I can plane down to do the job. I also brought home hopefully the very last UFE that still needs a vaping rim having moved a colony off it today. I’m starting to pile up a fair bit of old wax from combs I’ve decided are beyond use, so I ought to get on and build a new solar wax melter. Another thing that came back with me today was a poly brood box that I’d repaired sufficiently using car body filler last year to be usable, but not even got as far as sanding it smooth let alone repainting it before it needed to be used, so that’s on the list. And I’ve all but run out of clear crownboards and fat dummies. Nucs and nuc UFEs are on the agenda at some point, but I’m ok for now. I think that’s all for the moment.
The one thing I’ve not had to do so far this year is make frames: I got through assembling quite a few of those last year.
The first apiary I visited today was the one I’ve been setting up for a local charity. I’d taken a second brood box and spare roof as I knew the roof needed some repair work and I was kind of hoping they might need more space. In fact I didn’t do the inspection. I got one of the people I’ve been teaching to do it. Everything went well and whilst the colony isn’t building as fast as I was hoping, it’s looking very healthy and happy and, for the moment at least, very calm.
The second was a bit more of a handful. I’d noticed yesterday that one of the colonies was still on a floor without a rim that I could vape through, so I took the entire hive apart to replace the floor, which wound them up a bit. As did the breakage of a couple of frame lugs which snapped as I was pushing the main body of the top bar sideways. They’d been building play cups like crazy too and obviously I had to find all of them to make sure they weren’t real queen cells. I’ll drop back with a super tomorrow and next week I’ll have to keep an eye out in case there really are queen cells. Talking of the queen, I saw her. Most of her “red blob” has worn off, but I felt as though I’d wound them up enough at that point. I’ll re-mark her next time.
The colony that I’d noticed was barely flying yesterday evening was much busier today, but still only has at most three frames of brood. I did my best to piss them off too by replacing the entire hive (and breaking another frame lug in the process). Most of the hive parts were pressed into service last May when I’d started running out of kit for swarms, so they weren’t in the best shape necessarily and I wanted to get that sorted. There was an entire family of slugs in the brood box. Hopefully I got all of those out before I put it in the car 😀
If anything, the water company (I assume) have done rather too good a job of clearing the brambles around the site. All the work they’ve done has removed any protection from stroppy bees for the garden of the house next door, so I’d best take some honey and make a pre-emptive house call tomorrow. Not that they’ll know it’s my bees if they do have a problem. I know of at least two feral colonies the other side of their house. But they’re bound to assume it’s mine….
