The two new colony starts will be here Sunday, so today we set up their new hives. We are choosing to go with the more shallow Western boxes as they hold about 55 pounds compared to 80 which is just too heavy. As soon as they are happy in their new home, we will add more boxes, one at a time, depending on how the flowers, weather and all go.
Then off to extract honey from the hives whose colonies did not make it through the winter. There wasn’t much extra honey. It appears one colony starved to death and I’m not sure what happened to the other. Maybe the same thing. No bees in either and very little honey stores.
Here is how we get the honey out.
This is the extractor.
Looking down inside, we put 4 frames in at once (to balance)
We go round and round and round with the handle and using centrifugal force, the honey appears out the bottom of the canister.
After the round and round part, we take a break. Tomorrow, we will finish it up and clean it all up for end of summer again. Hopefully we will have the motor on for next time.
Now the relaxing part was to do this month’s block for the Aurofil BOM. These are the blocks so far.
For you who are watching the health series, tonight is #3.
The transplants are now in their new temporary pots. They will again get transplanted when the weather is warm enough. The peas haven’t come up, so will have to plant those again along with starting more seeds. Why is it so difficult to plant just the right number of seeds. If I plant just a few, they don’t come up, if I plants many, it seems most of them come up.
The little Polish caps are really getting cute
Can you see how much the babies have grown? The chicks have feathers now and one of them insists on hopping up to the side of the container and over to the great outside world. They have been moved to another room and tomorrow will get screening over the top.
They have grown enough I have separated them into 3 containers and soon will have to be 4. Then they will graduate to the chicken coop to get acquainted with the adults. Yes, I’ll have to put chicken wire around them to protect them until they get bigger, but I’ll love having them out of the house.
It’s a good thing I take these photos as I go through my day. Otherwise, by the time I get to the end, I forget where I started. Today it was with the beehives. 2 of the 3 hives didn’t make it through the winter. I have talked to other beekeepers and it seems that about 3/4 of the bees this year didn’t make it. They are blaming it on the poor blackberry crop. The bees didn’t get enough put away for the winter. When I opened the two hives, there was no honey left in them and very few dead bees. So apparently that’s what happened. I don’t know, maybe when they run out of food, they go searching even though it is too cold.
First if you are at all interested in health, I want to recommend this series of free videos by Dr. Youngberg. This is a series of 12 he is recording and making available. Tonight’s lecture is on exercise and diet and how it will optimize your health and turn on good genes and off bad genes. It is available for the week. We enjoyed the first lecture and encourage you to upload and listen to them.
Today has been a day of cleaning up little projects and working a new big project. At least that is what I wrote at the start of my day. I was going to do some major yard work, plant a number of starts in little pots, and a couple other little jobs. Some jobs have a way of taking more time than they should. So the day really went like this:
Small job (hahaha) Clean wheels on one chair. Take all the threads out of wheels which hadn’t been done for about 15 months.
There is a bit of accumulation here. Have you ever had to do this? Here I am removing bunches of threads and lint.
Finally done with one wheel and here is the pile of lint from ONE WHEEL.
This job is taking way to long so after three wheels I hemmed this pair of jeans and this really was a small job.
Back to the wheels, all done (after 3 hours), cleaned and oiled.
And here is how much thread and whatever a chair with 5 wheels can hold.
Now off to remove 3 Barbary plants, moss, and weeds. This was the expected big task and DH dug them out for me and then cleaned my trimming mess when I was done. It took about the same amount of time as the one chair! The Barbary are the red plants and just full of thorns.
And you can see in this photo the ground cover is also out of control.
It does seem that I get a larger mess before getting done. What about you?
And now this area is cleaned, I just have to get a few plants to replace what we’ve removed . I’d also like to take out those yellow-green plants in the upper right back. They are a bush dogwood that I need to keep trimming. They sprawl much more than I like.
As a break while working on this project, I did some walking on the back deck. Look at these funny chickens, who started following me (hoping for food). As soon as I turned to look at them, they got this “who me” pose.
(small job) I also got these steps worked on. They are under the cedar tree and when the cedar sheds, it makes the steps very slippery. They are now cleaned up
And this is the raspberry patch. In the past, I have always trimmed them back every year. I was talked into leaving them, without trimming. With the looks of these, I think I’ll go back to trimming.
And that is how the day really went. Please tell me you have days like this as well. I have lots of them.
