Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
We’re Beekeepers too – Keep up to date with the comings and goings of our bee colonies and life in the hive. The bees are almost always up to something.
Having harvested some honey a few weeks ago, the bees fought back and stopped us taking any more for a while. One of the hives had honey that, at the time, wasn’t fully sealed, another decided to sting us and prevent us getting any off. So, we left them for a few weeks and then...
This weekend was all about the honey harvest! Anna collected the extractor on Friday afternoon and I’d already put clearer boards on a couple of our hives. The ‘Bedroom’ Hive was huge with 4 completely full supers and a fifth that was half full. ‘Dyfi’ hive had two full supers and ‘Leri’ had a couple...
I thought I was doing quite well with the bees this year. There was an early swarm or possibly a supersedure in the hive by the bedroom at the beginning of April. This was actually a fairly good thing as the hive re-queened and the queen was laying last time I looked. All good there...
After a very cold and wet start to Spring things warmed up enough for me to inspect the bees a couple of times. The first inspection was mainly to put the queen excluders back on and see what was happening. I knew there were bees in both hives but the queen excluders had been removed...
I managed to go the entire Easter weekend without turning my computer on, hence the lack of blog posts. I thought you wouldn’t mind waiting as turning my computer on would only mean that I’d end up working. Staying away from it and out of the office was best. That said, I did of course...
Having had a bumper year last year we weren’t expecting much from the bees this year. Our expectations weren’t helped by the fact that we lost our largest colony over the winter. I suspect they swarmed late in the year after we had harvested from them and got them ready for winter. With no queen...
Just a quick trip inside one of our beehives.
It seems as though my somewhat experimental preemptive artificial swarm technique has, at least to a certain extent, worked. With only one colony surviving the winter we wanted to ‘make increase’ this year. The fact that this colony had taken up residence in a hive next to the bedroom window also meant that there weren’t...
Despite my sore finger and the strong winds, I did manage to do some beekeeping at the weekend. We’d bought a new poly hive so I constructed that. It wasn’t much of a project really and only took about 5 minutes so instead I set to cleaning out a whole load of old brood frames...
It was something of a mixed bag over the winter for our bees. One colony that was huge in the autumn died off whilst the colony that had taken up residence in the hive near the bedroom window did quite well. This colony had continued to expand throughout the Spring and was now looking quite...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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Amber Warnings and Whiteout Nights: A Wild-Camp in the Dyfi Hills
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