Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
Saturday proved to be a perfect day for beekeeping. Light winds, sunshine and temperatures around 18ºC. We were due to make hive inspections of all of the hives in our apiary and had a bit of re-homing to do on one colony. Pendam – Nuc Box This Nuc box contains an artificial swarm from the...
We made our weekly hive inspections on Wednesday afternoon and there was some progress. The bees are still acting a little strangely though. Both the colony in the Clettwr hive and the colony in the triple nuc box (a caught swarm from Clettwr) are very active. They are up and busy from first light until...
Some good news on the bee front at last. The first of our colonies to swarm was the one from the hive we have called Leri. We lost the swarm so the queen from this hive disappeared over the horizon along with half the colony, leaving us with depleted numbers in the hive, no queen...
We had hoped that after catching and re-housing a swarm from one of our hives that things in the apiary would settle down. The colony in the strongest hive had now been split into three: A colony in the original hive with a queen cell An ‘artificially swarmed’ colony with queen cells in a nuc...
Another day and yet more beekeeping. Hopefully that’s all the intervention they’ll need for today though. After catching the swarm from Clettwr yesterday it was housed in a temporary plastic nuc box overnight. We have run out of suitable equipment to accommodate any more colonies so borrowed a triple nuc box contraption from Ann. Essentially...
Clettwr, the hive that I performed an artificial swarm on last week in an attempt to prevent them from swarming has – you’ve guessed it – swarmed today. So much for the artificial swarm, I obviously didn’t do it right. Our neighbours phoned me just after 10am to say the bees were out and about...
Well, our inexperience with beekeeping has been shown once again. I was hoping for a nice easy inspection today. We inspected last week and reported that all was well in Clettwr but the bees in Leri had swarmed. Today I had hoped to have a quick check in Clettwr to make sure there were no...
No, I’m not talking about the ‘mile-high club’, I’m refer to the mating flight of queen bees. Today looks set to be a nice day weather-wise and I’m fairly certain that if all is going well our virgin queen bee should have emerged on Saturday and should therefore be ready to take her first mating...
That was nice, a hive inspection without any surprises. I’ve just been out to inspect both hives and the bees were particularly well behaved. Anna was at work and Morgan at school but we needed to check on the hives so I did it on my own today. Maybe having just one person inspect them...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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