A Simple Life of Luxury | Weblog

Dandelion Flower 3

Dandelions – Friend or Foe

They may be considered weeds, but… They grow better than anything else around here. The guinea pigs love to eat the leaves. We can eat them and even make dandelion flower cookies. The bright yellow flowers are lovely. The seed heads are impressive. The bees can make honey from them. I think it’s time we...

Red Tailed Bumblebee No. 1 6

Bumblebee Photos – Which is Best?

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...

Queen Cells 1

Another Day and Another Colony of Bees

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...

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Windsurfing Ynyslas

After what seemed like the end of summer yesterday and a very autumnal feeling day, today was a little warmer, much drier and there was still some wind so I had no option but to go windsurfing. I took my GoPro camera with me of course and got some nice footage of a decent session...

Inspection Preparation 3

Hive Inspection Number 2 – Queen Cells in Leri!

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...

Morgan eating Wood Sorrel 1

Springwatch & Food Foaging at Ynyshir RSPB

There’s lots going on at Ynyshir RSPB reserve at the moment. Spring Watch will be coming from there in a couple of weeks so it is all go getting things ready for the production. A studio is being set up overlooking the lake and various nest boxes are being modified to accept cameras – I...

Bee on Dandelion 0

Keeping Honey Bees in the Garden

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...

Morgan the Mountain-Biker 0

Morgan the Mountain-Biker

Morgan has been dying to ride his bike up at Nant yr Arian for a while so whilst the schools were closed last thursday for polling I took him up there and we had a ride around the lake. he also had his first go along the Hippity Hop section of trail. It was a...

Hive Inspection 0

Hive Inspection

We carried out our first proper hive inspection on Friday, on both our hives (Clettwr and Leri). As new beekeepers it was all very exciting but seemed to go pretty well. The plan was to go through the hives, try to spot the queens and if possible mark them, see if the bees had started...

Cream Coloured Pollen 0

Pollen Varieties

We’ve been watching our new bees coming and going and they certainly seem to be bringing back quite a bit of pollen. This is of course good news, but although we have a pollen chart I don’t think that identifying the pollen is going to be easy. The pollen chart really only shows the colour...