Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
Morgan and I had a nice little walk through the dunes earlier. We were actually wandering across to the beach to check out what was happening with the RSPB Shear Madness. Unfortunately there wasn’t anyone there so we couldn’t find out more about the Manx Shearwaters or let them know that I often see them when...
The trouble with bees is that you just never know quite what to expect! Our last inspection was pretty good, all four colonies in all four hives were looking up with queens, eggs and larvae in all of them, no signs of swarming and they were beginning to draw out empty frames and start building...
As mentioned in our latest beekeeping update, our apiary that started out with two hives currently has an additional third hive and a nuc box in it. We’re not plnning on keeping them all with full colonies in them and will probably merge them into two colonies before the end of the summer but at the moment...
Saturday proved to be a perfect day for beekeeping. Light winds, sunshine and temperatures around 18ºC. We were due to make hive inspections of all of the hives in our apiary and had a bit of re-homing to do on one colony. Pendam – Nuc Box This Nuc box contains an artificial swarm from the...
We made our weekly hive inspections on Wednesday afternoon and there was some progress. The bees are still acting a little strangely though. Both the colony in the Clettwr hive and the colony in the triple nuc box (a caught swarm from Clettwr) are very active. They are up and busy from first light until...
Some good news on the bee front at last. The first of our colonies to swarm was the one from the hive we have called Leri. We lost the swarm so the queen from this hive disappeared over the horizon along with half the colony, leaving us with depleted numbers in the hive, no queen...
We had hoped that after catching and re-housing a swarm from one of our hives that things in the apiary would settle down. The colony in the strongest hive had now been split into three: A colony in the original hive with a queen cell An ‘artificially swarmed’ colony with queen cells in a nuc...
Another day and yet more beekeeping. Hopefully that’s all the intervention they’ll need for today though. After catching the swarm from Clettwr yesterday it was housed in a temporary plastic nuc box overnight. We have run out of suitable equipment to accommodate any more colonies so borrowed a triple nuc box contraption from Ann. Essentially...
Clettwr, the hive that I performed an artificial swarm on last week in an attempt to prevent them from swarming has – you’ve guessed it – swarmed today. So much for the artificial swarm, I obviously didn’t do it right. Our neighbours phoned me just after 10am to say the bees were out and about...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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