I finished my course of antibiotics today and I’ve been itching to go for a swim, so feeling much better I hurried off to the pool. That’s when I found out just how well I wasn’t 🙂
Bearing in mind that immediately before I was ill I was managing 20 x 43s reps on an 85 second interval, today I was struggling to do 50s reps on a 90s interval. I kept at it though, skipping a few where necessary and not trying to force the pace. Hopefully as the week rolls on it will become easier.
Thanks to my lack of mobility over the last week I’ve not got much done in the veggie plot other than a bit of tidying up, so it was nice to get out today and sow some more calabrese and romanesco cauliflower seeds. It may well be too late for both, but we’ll see how it goes given that this year has been so weird already.
It was also in the plan to sow another batch of spring onions, but it turned out that I didn’t have any seed left, so that will have to wait for another time.
I can stagger about a bit now the antibiotics are having an effect, so this afternoon I was doing odd jobs in the garden to stave off the boredom and when I was taking my shoes off to come in for a drink I saw this out of the window. I’ve no idea where it came from. It’s a fair way from most of my hives. I was sitting no more than four feet away when I took this in just my shorts and a t-shirt. They were so docile.
It was about three feet off the ground in a small apple tree, so out came all the kit and rather than shaking the bees off the branch into a box I decided to be kind and snipped off the branches they’re on with secateurs so I could carry them away, lay them on a sheet and put my new resized box over them.
They seemed happy enough with the idea and started fanning to let the stragglers know where they were.
There were a fair few stragglers too, as some had dropped onto the grass when I snipped off the branch. But I lay part of one of the branches they’d been on over the top of them and they all climbed on so I could shake them off in front of the box.
Most of them got the idea pretty quickly.
And in about ten or fifteen minutes they’d pretty much moved in.
This evening I removed the wooden blocks and the remainder of the branch (they all climb up to the top of the box, so that’s easy), wrapped it up in the sheet and took them over to an empty hive where I gently shook them in having removed some of the frames first. The frames wouldn’t normally be the opposite way around to those in the box underneath, but there’s a good reason this case.
Then all the frames go back in.
And a few left outside once the lid is on found their way back in through the entrance.
Once they’ve settled in I’ll remove the plugs either side to open up a couple more entrances so they have plenty of room to get in and out during the summer.
Or rather, not swimming, 7th June 🙁
I was out in the garden after lunch on Saturday when suddenly many of my major muscles starting convulsing, to the point where it was painful and I had to drop to all-fours so I didn’t fall over. After a couple of minutes that passed, but I realised then that despite being out in the sunshine and still being able to feel the warmth on my skin, I was shivering. I managed to get indoors, bounced off the walls a bit on the way to the bedroom, fell on the bed and zonked out for several hours. That evening I was pretty much sitting in a puddle of my own sweat all the time and my body temperature was 100°F (can’t get the thermometer to read °C at the moment). The small hours of Sunday morning were a bit hallucinogenic 🙂 Yesterday my temperature had come down a bit, but I was still quite feverish and didn’t sleep very well last night either.
This morning I woke up to find that my left foot was swollen and bright red, and my left calf was blotchy red all down the outside. I can walk, but it’s not easy because I have limited feeling in my toes. My temperature is closer to normal, but I’m still going through phases of sweating and shivering. A trip to the GP was arranged fairly sharpish.
I am now on heavy-duty antibiotics and not planning on doing much with my time for the next few days as its become quite uncomfortable to even stand up, so swimming is off the menu for the time being 🙁
Writing some time after the event, this isn’t a session I can remember too well thanks to what’s happened since. Hopefully that will be a one-off.
Something of a nondescript session today. I wonder if I’m getting to the stage where I’m not going to get any faster for the time being.
Bit of a tricky session today. I took my son with me to swim and with the other people in the lane it became a bit scrappy in terms of timing reps, so in the end I gave up and just did the best I could. Towards the end of the session we were left with the lane to ourselves, so my 25m reps weren’t too bad at all, all being below 19s.
I’m wondering if there’s a wild colony somewhere around here, as this group had settled well away from my own hives. Unfortunately it was also about ten metres up in a sycamore tree so there was no way I could reach it.
I did think about chainsawing through most of the branch and then allowing it to fall gently to the ground using a rope to control it, but I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t fall on a barn roof, so I had to let them go.
My daughter woke me this morning to tell me that another swarm had arrived. I’ve no idea where it came from, but the bees were still in the air when I got to a window and were clearly starting to settle low down in an apple tree. Unfortunately the cardboard box I used to capture the last one wasn’t really in a fit state for another outing so I needed to get a new one and I didn’t have any of an appropriate size. In the end I decided to make one by cutting down a larger box, which actually means I now have something that should be a little more sturdy. Having spent half an hour or perhaps a little longer doing that I collected together everything I needed, laid it out on the grass next to the tree and went back inside to put on my bee suit. As I lifted it off the rail and turned to face the window I saw all the bees suddenly lift into the air again, clearly already intent on moving to a new home. They’d not even been there two hours. We watched as they moved off and I realised they were heading towards the apiary, so I followed them.
One of my hives died out a couple of weeks back despite all my efforts to keep it going. I think the weather had just ground them down to the point where they no longer had the numbers to remain viable despite making it through the winter. Dismantling it, melting down the comb and sterilising the hive parts for re-use was on my list of stuff to do this week, but the swarm had already found it and was busy moving in. This isn’t really a desirable state of affairs because any disease present in the hive can get picked up by the new inhabitants, and I prefer newly-housed swarms to draw out new comb from the honey they carried with them when they left their original colony rather than feeding it to larvae and potentially passing on disease that way. Too late now though. I guess I will just be happy that I have another colony and I’ll try to move them onto fresh comb as soon as I can.
On the first warm, dry day for weeks, I had noticed a higher level of activity than normal around the entrance to one of my hives, but I’ve not been opening the hives up when it’s been so cold and wet and it didn’t surprise me that the bees might suddenly get so active given the opportunity, so perhaps I should have expected to find this just after lunchtime today (26th May). The good news was that it settled near the ground where I could reach it. The bad news was that they settled on the post supporting a crab apple tree, so I couldn’t exactly trim it off and carry the bees away.
I decided to try something I’ve really not had much success with in the past, but I couldn’t think of much else. I put a cardboard box (upside down) over the top of the cluster (just visible at the top of the above photo) and then puffed smoke at the bottom of the cluster repeatedly until most of them climbed into the box. Once they’d moved I put the box on a sheet on the ground and propped it open at the bottom (spilling a few bees in the process).
Clearly they were happy enough there though. The one on the bottom right of the wooden block here is fanning pheromones out into the air to tell the stragglers where to come (as are a few of the others).
Now I just have to make up a new hive, which is all going to be a bit of a rush this evening as I really wasn’t expecting to have to provide new living quarters at the moment, and tomorrow morning I’ll put them inside. Gives me a convenient opportunity to try out my new 3d-printed hive entrances though.
