Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
Unsuccessful Swarming We never have much success with our bees during swarming season. As soon as there are signs of swarming we tend to do the standard artificial swarm procedure. This is supposed to ‘trick’ the bees into thinking they have swarmed and you should end up with two colonies: One containing the original queen...
After a nice night away with Anna I decided to take a quick look at the bees. It had only been 5 days since I’d last inspected them but it’s prime swarm season so it’s good to keep an eye on them. Leri Hive The first hive, Leri, was all looking good. They have a...
Another quiet weekend here for us. We had some good days on the ‘solars’ though thanks to the blue skies and cool temperatures. There was barely any import from the grid. Just a little here and there for things like showers because that draws too much power for our inverter. Otherwise we were using solar...
Phew, I think I’m on top of things in the garden! It’s the same every year – things seem a little overwhelming when you first venture out and there are so many jobs to do. However, a few sunny days and the nice long list of jobs to do soon starts to get whittled down....
The bees have had their usual ups and downs this years. Things started well but we then lost a couple of swarms while I was in hospital. I did manage to split a colony though and caught an errant swarm too. We now have four colonies all of which are (we think) queen-right. The smallest...
I probably can’t really blame this on my recent heart attack but I may as well. Having been out of action for a few weeks I haven’t been able to inspect the bees properly. Typically this was during peak swarm season and sure enough the bees made the most of it. I did manage to...
My plan for Saturday included some apiary updates. Things here tend to rot really quickly so some hive hardware needed replacing. We’ve been gradually replacing our plywood and pine hives with cedar ones which do tend to last a bit longer. I had a new flat-packed hive ready to build and today was the day....
With temperatures just about getting to double figures, the sun shining and no wind I decided it was time for the first hive inspection of 2021. The bees and been flying for a couple of days. They’d even looked quite busy for a few minutes at one point. I therefore knew that there were at...
It’s difficult to persuade Morgan to get out of his room these days. He’s such a typical teenager! I did manage to get him out to inspect the bee-hives last week though. All was looking good in the hives. An Extra Brood Box The biggest colony was bursting at the seams so I decided to...
Anniversary Treats There hasn’t been a huge amount happening here. It was our anniversary at the end of last week but as we are still shielding from a deadly virus we didn’t have our usual day trip out! Instead we just stayed at home like we’ve been doing throughout lockdown. We did however have a...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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