Memory Lane, 3rd January 2023: Christmas T-shirts

Posted on April 19, 2024 by james

Gifts from my children. And so appropriate that it’s almost a shame to wear them when they might get damaged 😀

Posted in Random, Veg plot | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Apiary land(e)scaping

Posted on April 19, 2024 by james

I stopped by an apiary this evening to find out what state it was in and how much work was required. The brambles were starting to encroach a bit at the end of last Summer and I’d decided to take some tools down and clear up a bit.

I was greatly surprised therefore to find that someone has been in over the winter and very heavily trimmed back the hedges and brambles and taken down some small trees. There’s so much more space and it all looks much tidier. Saves me a fair bit of work 😀

The hives are next to a water pumping station that I was given the impression (by the landowner) was out of use. That would now appear not to be the case. I feel guilty now though because the hives are between the pumping station and half a dozen manholes, so the manhole covers are all in the flight path of the hives. I might now have to go and have a chat with the owners about moving them forward so people can work there safely without getting in the way of the bees.

The hives face south and are in full Sun. Even after 6pm there was plenty of activity at the entrances (unlike my home colonies which face south-east and had already called it a day) apart from one colony which was a swarm from a bait hive last year. Bees were returning to the hive, but few and far between. I’ll find out what’s going on there tomorrow.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

Splitting a hive with a queen cell

Posted on April 19, 2024 by james

I decided this morning that despite the breezy weather I’d crack on and split the hive I found a queen cell in yesterday.

I gathered all the parts for a new hive together and placed then next to the existing hive so I’d be able to swap them over quickly. Then moved the existing hive to the other end of the apiary.

Note to self: When you’re doing a split and moving a full double brood hive to the other end of the apiary in one go, do make sure you choose the correct one before you pick it up, move it and come back to the new hive.

Yes, I had a complete brain fart there. Had to move it back, then re-strap the proper one before moving that again. Full double brood hives are not light 😀

At least one bit was easy: I took the first frame of brood that I came to out of the original hive and there were plenty of eggs in it and no queen cells, so that could be transferred over to the new hive for the flying bees. Drop an undrawn frame in towards the edge of the old hive having moved the existing frames together, close up, “job’s a good ‘un” as they say around here.

There was a bit of a frenzy in the apiary for a few minutes and then things started to calm down again. After half an hour there were few bees at the entrance of the hive containing the “house bees” and many queuing up at the entrance to the new hive for the flying bees. I might take a peak through the clear crownboards tomorrow just to see how things look.

Activity at my bait hive has not stopped yet, though I guess it may take a day or two anyhow. Or perhaps it’s another colony altogether (and not one of mine)?

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 3rd January 2023: Time for a new smoker

Posted on April 18, 2024 by james

I kept my old (cardboard box) smoker in the greenhouse because it was way too smelly to stay in the house. I fetched it the other day intending to do some smoking and discovered that smoked cardboard is in fact a slug/snail delicacy and it was really now beyond use. So I decided to make a new, larger one. I’d saved some oven shelves from an old oven that I thought would work inside and everything else I put together from re-used timber etc. and a few bits I had sitting around.

It’s really just a ply cupboard with small vents in the front and the top.

Inside there’s a bar for hanging food from as well as runners for the shelves and a frame for the smoke generator shelf to sit on.

Next I need to add supports for the “drip shelf” over the smoke generator so nothing can fall down onto it and start a bigger fire.

After that I think it will be ready for a test drive.

Posted in Projects | Tagged | Leave a comment

Dealing with a swarming colony when you can’t find the queen

Posted on April 18, 2024 by james

As I wrote in my previous post, it appears that one of my colonies may be about to swarm. It’s so stuffed with bees that there’s no chance of finding the queen easily, so I really need to deal with the situation without doing so.

At the moment I’m thinking that I’ll move the existing box a little to one side, put a new floor and brood box in its place and then transfer one of the frames of brood into it, backfilling with either foundation or drawn comb. That one frame left on the original site should have no queen cells on. I’ll then move the original box to the other end of the apiary.

The flying bees in the original box should gradually shift back to their original site where brood will emerge over the next week. Younger bees will stay put and orientate to the new position of the hive as they leave. Whichever doesn’t have a queen will produce queen cells. The other should contain eggs and probably won’t have queen cells any more, if it ever did. I think I just need to tear down all but one of the queen cells and leave them for a while to get on with things.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

Time to move home

Posted on April 18, 2024 by james

Well, not “move” so much perhaps, as to get a new one.

It was a very pleasant morning this morning when the wind wasn’t blowing, so I decided to swap three colonies of bees from the boxes they were in to poly hives. After the chaos of last Spring, not all the bees were in the boxes I wanted them in, so having taken advantage of that fact to get a few repairs done and repainting I thought that this afternoon I might as well get them moved.

The first colony was very calm and building up nicely, no bother to move the brood box to one side, put a new one in its place and transfer the frames across. I didn’t even need to use the smoker.

The second was an entirely different hovercraft of eels. It was bursting at the seams and most dischuffed at the disruption to their living space. As I was moving frames into the new box I noticed a charged queen cell on the bottom of one frame. I wasn’t expecting that! I estimate that it was probably around four days old, so I have a few days before they consider swarming. Time to close them up and go away to have a think about what to do next.

The third was somewhere between the two. They didn’t seem too distressed about what was going on, but it was harder to tell because of the fall-out from the previous hive.

So, all done, relatively little fuss and one “problem” to resolve over the next couple of days.

Early this evening I went out to tidy up the hive parts I’d left out, put straps back on the hives and mow the grass in front of them. All the bees had returned to their hives and everything was quiet, so that looks like a success to me.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged | Leave a comment

BT are utterly bloody useless, part 4

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

At last today I’ve been able to get access to my account details once again. Possibly I could have done earlier, but no-one has actually bothered to inform me of the fact. I just had to try it after the three working days that they wanted to be able to fix the problem were up.

And having seen my last bill it appears the reason that it is so out of whack with previous bills is that they have applied a load of refunds because of a change in their billing. I’d have thought that someone could have actually told me that when I said that I didn’t understand why the amount was so inconsistent with previous bills. It’s not as though they actually took the time to explain any changes to me when the billing was changed, after all.

This has all been such an unimpressive episode. I know they’ve paused the project to replace copper lines with fibre because of the issues for people who need a phone to work when they have no power (which they were told would be a problem years ago), but come the time when most people have high-bandwidth internet connections to the property, making wifi calling for multiple phones feasible for just about everyone and meaning that they can transfer their land line numbers to other VoIP providers, I can see BT losing a lot of customers.

Posted in Random | Tagged | Leave a comment

Memory Lane, 21st December 2022: Winter solstice

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

So what on earth are these dandelions up to?

Posted in Environment | Leave a comment

Spears at lunchtime

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

It’s been two and a half years in the making, but this morning my wife persuaded me to cut these so we could have them with lunch.

After such a long wait it was quite exciting to finally get to taste something, grilled with hollandaise sauce. And very nice they were too. Hopefully we’ll be picking more a couple of times a week, at least until the start of June.

Posted in Smallholding, Veg plot | Tagged | Leave a comment

More beehive repairs

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

I’m not entirely sure where the time went today, but a fair bit of it was spent working on more beehive parts. I filled a few dents in some poly brood boxes and repainted them (and in a poly roof), oiled the “vaping rim” that I added to a UFE and finished converting the four section boxes into two bait hives (mostly by gluing one on top of another and then gluing in a rail to support frames). I’ve completely ignored bee space issues with the latter on the grounds that they won’t be in the box long enough for it to become a problem. As the boxes are very old, I also oiled them to help keep the water out.

Posted in Bee-keeping, Smallholding | Tagged , | Leave a comment