Sheep vs Bees
After my post about the weekend and all the things that had gone wrong, I thought I’d better balance it out with some other things today.
First an update on the sheep invasion. The measures I put in place to keep them out didn’t last long. They were soon back destroying everything and have now smashed out chiminea as well. We can’t get hold of the the farmer so don’t quite know what to do.
There was no option but to try to strengthen the defences somewhat
The bees are alive
Whilst out there on Monday I did however notice that the bees were out flying for the first time this year. The sun was out, the wind had dropped (to nothing at all if you ask the broken weather station) and Spring was in the air. The bees had certainly decided this was the case anyway.
That’s good news as we’re never quite sure how the bees are doing and I had a feeling that maybe they hadn’t made it through the winter this year. Partly because I hadn’t been in there to feed them as much as I usually would. I don’t actually think I’ve given them any fondant this year so seeing that they are still alive and well was a turn up for the books.
I checked that they had plenty of feed, which they did and left them to it. I did wonder afterwards if perhaps the sheep had been knocking against their hive and if maybe that had spurred them out into the sunshine. There was a distinct lack of sheep around at the time so maybe the bees had chased them off.
Our beekeeping kit hadn’t fared too well over the winter though. It had been in a plastic box inside the shed but has got very damp and mouldy – nice!
Enjoying the Sunshine
There wasn’t much for me to do other than leave them to it, so it was off to the estuary for a lovely surf ski session in the sunshine. Lovely, but hard work as well with a series of hard intervals.
As far as the weather station goes, then the anemometer does seem to be sticking. But as I said before I don’t have to buy a complete replacement this time. Last time I replaced the anemometer, I upgraded to the latest version which is a little more modular than the previous version. This mean I can indeed replace just the ‘wind cartridge’ that contains the main moving parts and the bearings at a cost of £35 not £175. That’s good news, even if it does mean a couple of trips up the pole to fix it.
