I set these two up in my home apiary, a little distance from the existing hives. One is a standard poly brood box. The other is a pair of poly supers with standard national brood frames inside. They have both top and bottom bee space, so are a bit tricky to use otherwise.
They were out for several months but got no interest that I’m aware of, perhaps due to being too close to other colonies though I’ve had swarms move in to empty boxes barely a couple of metres from active hives before now.
Mid-February feels very early for celandines to be flowering here, but they’re definitely giving it some serious thought. Even the daffodils aren’t out yet, though by the look of the buds they won’t be too long now.
We’ve had a lot of rain this week 🙁 Not long ago it felt as though the ground was finally drying out sufficiently that “stuff might usefully be achieved”, but now it’s like the Somme again. Possibly wetter. I need to get these new beds finished though, so I loaded the trailer half-full of compost (to keep the weight down) and dragged it around to the veg plot. Unfortunately I ran out of cardboard so I had to stop early.
I reckon I can use multiple thicknesses of newspaper instead to get it finished though. With a bit of luck I can crack on with that tomorrow morning before it starts bucketing down again.
Elsewhere I have taken sweet peas and lobelia out of the propagator as they’ve already germinated. The sweet peas were only sown six days ago! I should be sowing more tomorrow (once it starts raining) all being well, though there’s a fair bit of other stuff I want to get through too.
I’ve just found out that Status Quo are performing in Taunton later this year. I think I last saw them in Reading in the early 90s. 1990s, that is. Not 1890’s. I’m not that old, even if they are 😀
To be fair, some of them aren’t that old. There is a certain irony given the name of the band that there’s only one original member left, and two of them weren’t even born when the band formed 😀
I’d go to see them, but apparently JLS and Busted are also on the line-up and I have to draw the line somewhere…
I love the way that the odious little man Rees-Mogg has claimed in interviews about the Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections that the Labour party didn’t achieve 50% of the vote, as if that’s some sort of damning indictment of their performance. Tell me, Mr. Smug: What proportion of the vote did your party achieve in the last General Election. Would it by any chance be less than the Labour party achieved in Kingswood? Oh, so it would: 44.9% for Labour vs. 43.9% for the Tories.
I’m not a Labour voter. I don’t vote for the colour of a rosette. But if that’s the best you and your ilk can come up with then you really are deep in the quagmire come the next GE. Bring it on!
The first swarm to arrive in one of my home bait hives this year. Not from my colonies, I hasten to add 🙂 I feel quite chuffed to have seen them actually turn up at the hive and then dissappear inside like water running down a plughole 😀
My son and daughter gave me this today.
I’ve not had calvados for the better part of forty years, when my parents hosted a French family as part of our village’s twinning. The father of our visiting family was major of the twinned village and made his own calvados, so brought a couple of bottles over with him.
I’m very much looking forward to tasting it.
I’d pretty much gone as far as I thought I could with my Linux Deep Sky Stacker port for the moment, but then realised that some bits that still didn’t compile were actually simper to fix than I thought, and not a huge amount of work once I’d done the widget layout with Qt Designer. When I initially did the design for oacapture more than ten years ago the designer wasn’t really able to achieve what I wanted, but it seems far more capable now. As little more than a newbie I was able to get the layout done in less than an hour including time to learn to use Designer and make the inevitable mistakes, and then within a few hours I had all the coding and packaging up of resources completed too. So this is the dialog for all the star mask options done.
For reference, this is the original Windows version
I’ve now started on the “save image” file dialog which is a bit more messy as it uses options that are available in the native Windows dialog, but not in Qt. Unfortunately I can’t really test what I’ve done so far as it needs work completing on the processing dialog which is rather too Windows-centric for me to understand easily (and someone else has started work on it anyhow). Time to find something else to work on… Perhaps I’ll see if I can move the image in the above dialog down a bit and put it in a dark grey box like the original.
I’ve been looking for a new apiary site somewhere nearby and the owners of local property have offered me space in an area they can’t really use alongside this south-facing pasture.
Access isn’t perfect, but not bad — the actual site is to the right of the photo at the top of a gentle slope and the gate is behind me so it’s not very far to carry kit which I can then lift over the fence.
Unfortunately I then have to walk down to the gate which is partially obscured by the post in the centre of the photo, and then back up again. Still, it’s just me so not a major hardship. I’ve set up two bait hives on the site to see if I can catch a swarm: I know there are feral bees living in the roof of some offices nearby (I’ve offered to try to do something about that, but the owners insist that it isn’t a problem. Hah!)
Back when I used to work with COBOL, there were jokes about “design by committee”. These days I’m not always sure that C++ isn’t going the same way. So many little bits and pieces have been stuffed into the language to make it more difficult for people to do “the wrong thing” that the code is becoming completely incomprehensible if they’re fully utilised. And there’s stuff that was added to the language not so long ago that is now at best deprecated or at worst illegal now. I think the time has come to stop fiddling, please?
I’ve had a situation this week where a package used by code I’m working on (which has to be compiled using C++20 standards) can’t be used because it’s C++14 (I think) and in C++20 mode the compiler throws it out. I can’t upgrade the package to a later version (which is C++20-compatible) because that would break other applications using the same package. I could carry around my own private copy of the newer version in my code, but then I become responsible for making sure that new releases of the application get made if, say, there’s an important bugfix in the package, or if there’s a security hole found that has to be fixed. I don’t want that. It’s just too much work. In this instance I can wait a while to see how things progress with the other dependent packages, but I could really do without the pain.
Come to think of it, I’ve been in the same sort of place before with Ruby which can really trap you in dependency hell before you know it’s happening. That one ended up with the application being abandoned and re-written. Not in Ruby.
