Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
Our bees have been ‘bee-having’ themselves fairly well so far this year. They had looked like swarming at the end of April so we split them first thing in May. That all seemed to go well and by the end of May we had a new laying queen and the colony with the original queen...
Don’t get too excited, I’m not talking about Anna and I, I’m talking about our bees. We’ve always had trouble getting newly emerged queens to mate. We perform an artificial swarm as the perceived wisdom dictates, but for some reason the queen that emerges from the queen cell never seems to be able to start...
As it’s such a nice day I just couldn’t resist lunch in the garden. Not the best time of day for photos but here are a few photos from the garden anyway. The bees were certainly busy. Not just our honey bees but all sorts of other bees too. It’s always nice to see the...
It was just one of those days today. It looked as though it would be a good one. I had a bit of an adventure planned so was up early as usual. I couldn’t start the adventure too early though as I had to wait for high tide which wasn’t until 10am. The plan was...
Phew, that was a busy day even by my standards. Saturday was pretty busy as it goes with various garden carpentry repairs but I did get to chill with a nice big curry in the evening. Surf Ski Session Sunday started early with a Surf Ski session from Ynyslas to Borth. It was a lovely...
The sky is blue and the sun is shining once again. 22ºC at the moment and we must be getting used to this as it doesn’t feel hot, just pleasantly warm. Unusually though there are some white fluffly clouds in the sky today. Things are looking OK in the garden with some nice bright colours despite...
With Anna at band and Morgan surgically attached to his computer it was just me attending the honey show this year. We didn’t really have anything to exhibit though as we didn’t get any honey this year. I did submit a few photos to the photo competition and of course baked the honey cake. There were loads...
Just a quick update on the bees. If you remember last time I was quite pleased that both hives had re-queened. One seemed to be doing really well. The other wasn’t so great and I found the queen camped out under the mesh floor. I put her back in and hoped that maybe she had been out on...
‘Beehaving’? If you remember from my last post about the bees they had been ‘mis-beehaving’. I had performed an artificial split only for the half without the queen to be a little lax in creating a queen cell while the haf with the queen swarmed anyway leaving no queen cell behind. I think my actions have helped...
Why do our bees never do what they are supposed to do? I checked in on them today as it was such nice weather. 23ºC, sunny and with just a very light puff of a wind. Having performed an artificial swarm on them last week I wanted to check several things. Hive 1 This is the...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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