Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
After some pretty poor weather for the bees last week, Friday was a scorcher – 25ºC and wall to wall sunshine and it was our normal day to do a hive inspection, exactly 7 days after the last one. We were hoping the bees would be out and about all day in the sunshine and...
After the late spring onslaught it looks as though the weather may have settled down for a day or two. Summer officially started on June 1st and as I write this at 7:40am on June 2nd, it is already 15.2ºC out there, the sun is shining and there isn’t a puff of wind. Usually the latter fact...
In a little break in the weather this morning our bees were busy out collecting pollen and nectar whilst they could. I thought I;d play with my GoPro HD camera and see if I could get some footage of them coming and going, so here’s a very short clip of them doing their thing. I...
Thought we’d take some photos of honey bee eggs during our hive inspection at the weekend. Lots of people seem to have problem spotting them when doing an inspection, so this is what they look like. The are the tiny ‘grain of rice’ like structures at the bottom of the cells.
Things weren’t looking ideal for a hive inspection this weekend, strong winds, rain and a busy schedule were going to make things difficult. Saturday morning dawned warm(ish), fairly windy but with a gap in the rain so we quickly suited up and had a very quick inspection of both Clettwr and Leri. We were lucky...
It seems as though ‘Alice’ and here colony are settling in well to their new home. Yes, we’ve not only named the hives – Clettwr and Leri, but the queens of each colony have names too. Ffion for the queen in Leri and Alice for the queen in Clettwr. Alice’s colony is a little behind...
The Aberystwyth Beekeepers Association has a photographic competition coming up, so Morgan and I are going to enter. The categories are: Inside the Hive Beekeepers Other Bees (not the honey bee) We are only allowed one photo per category so I now have to choose a single photo for each. I have to make sure Morgan...
Fortunately, the day after discovering we had queen cells in one of our new bee hives we had a meeting of the Aberystwyth Beekeepers Association. We therefore turned up at the meeting, along with my iPad loaded with a photo of the queen cells so that we could get some advice and opinions from other...
Just over a week had passed since our first hive inspection and after our walk at Ynyshir, the sun came out, the wind eased a little so we had a perfect window of opportunity to make our second hive inspection. We were hoping to find that the bees had built out comb on a few...
Since we’ve been planning to keep honey bees, we’ve also been trying to make the garden as bee-friendly as possible. The idea was to plant bee-friendly plants, but still keep the garden looking nice. We wanted it to be a nice place for bees and humans alike. Sounds easy really, we like flowers, bees like...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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