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animals in your life

Started by billy rubin, April 23, 2020, 01:04:42 AM

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Anne D.

Poor Angel and Otis. Angel has the same coloring as my boy cat, Ricky.

billy rubin

yes.

its the way of the world


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

hermes2015

Yes, I am old enough. Shilling was a German poet. No, wait, that was Schiller.
"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."
― Charles Eames

billy rubin



News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

billy rubin


its autumn.

the bees are killing the golden rod. thats the yellow plant you see all around. a good bloom in the aurumn. if the bees are syrong, they will plug the hives with a dark, strong smelling honey that will see them through the winter without feeding.

im interested in increase, though, so i feed the shit out of em.


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

billy rubin

#695
here they are


i have no interest in collecting honey from these for quite a wqhile. im using 9-1/8 inch frames exclsuively with no queen excluders, so the queen is free to move up and down the entire beehive.  what im looking for is drawn comb. converting eight pounds of honey to one pound of beeswax is energetically expensive for a beehive, so ive been feeding them continuously all year. later on ill put in an excluder to separate the brood from the production honey boxes, which are 6-5/8 inches. i use 8-frame hives rather than 10s, , which is an  antique style that nobody else uses any more. but it works well for me. it just means the hives get crowded quickly, and get tall ver fast. so you have to stay on top of them or they plug and swarm.

the drawn comb is priceless in the spring, as the queen can begin laying in it whenever she wants without waiting for the young bees to draw the combe out. its also vulnerable, because if there arent enough workers to cover the comb, the wax moths destroy it. iven lost hundreds of supers of drawn comb during my own financial crisis when all my bees died, and while i have lots of empty boxes with plastic foundation still in it, its a job for the bees to make it into comb again.

anyway, the video shows a number of things in the late afternoo. first, the bees are still flyying and brining in pollen from the goldenrod. brood rearing is down from its peak in may, but right now the bees are building up a number of workers with a unique long-lived physiology to last the five months of winter and carry the hive through to march and april. most workers live only three weeks during the active season after they emerge, and the winter bees are metabolically different and will keep the clustoer going for months until the weather warms. so im feeding thick sugar syrup on top of the honey theyre bringing in to make sure that nobody runs short. they will anyway, but i can help.

if you look at the entrances, there are bees coming and going.  there are also bees pointing their ass ends in the air and fanning their wings. thjose are the ones ventilating the hive and evaporating the goldenrod nectar, turning it into thicker honey. nectar is mostly water by weight, cant remember how mych. but honey is 80 percent fructose, glucose, and whatever else the plant puts in and the bees bring back. the goldenrod surprised me the first year i was here. id pulled all the honey atthe end of august and got set for feeding for the winter. then the goldrod popped and thge bees filled the hives up.

shit, i said. this is great. i dont have to worry about feed as much.

 goldenrod honey is very darlk and strong flavored. people who like traditional crap honey dont care for it. it is absolutely not subtle and delicate and all that 19th century nonsense. its a genuine regional varietal and if people dont like it i dont care. when the bees are brining it in, its awful. theres somethin g in it that smells like a rotting road kill, and the bee yards stink while the workers are evaporating the nectar. aftyer that aromatic fraction is gone, the honey is fine. i cant smell it any more because i have lost most of my sense of smell, but my wife told me today that the ones behiond the warehouse were smelly, so all is good.

i had a singl;e hive make it through last winter. bought five queens ( i used to sell them in boxes of 100) and increase3d to six. three queens were superceded, maybe more, as i havent looked for the girls in a while. the ones i bought were marked with a red paint dot, which i consider silly, but thats what the breeders do. anyway, if all these survivie, i will turn six beehives into thirty next year. thats the most i want to keep on the home ranch, as they only fly so far. but i live in the country, and theres lots of neighbors who want bees on their ranches. i can easily keep three hundred hives within five or six miles of my kitchen porch, and thats what ill do.

in california i ran 700 or 800 hives towards the end, and migrated them all over four or five counties. i dont want to do that right now, most especially because its expensive in termes of vihicles and fuel, and also because theres mostly no pollination contracts herein the american east. most of my income was from commercial pollination in california, and out here people arent eductaed in its benefits. soo two or three hundred hive is the plan.

ill do honey, spring varietal and fall varietal, and then pollen and propolis. theres lots of bee products i can sell on the net at a decent markup, and im looking for income from these animals.

as well as all the philosophy that keeping bees invariably brings.


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

Tank

What are the black boxes on top of the hives for?
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

billy rubin

one gallon feeder jugs. the lids have a hole bored in the top, and i up-end the plastic jugs over the hole. tehre are three little holes punched in the cap.

when i was starting out i used all sorts of stuff to mix feed-- candy factory sweepings, bakery sugar, pallets of sucrose. later on i would mix my own in a 55 gallon barrell. start with 17 gallons of water and then add 400 pounds of sugar. it would fill the barrell with a thick syrup. eventually i would buy about ten barrells ata tiume from a sugar supplier.

towards the end i bought about 1100 steel gallon cans and arranged for another beekeeper to fill em for me with high fructose corn syrup he bought in bulk. he could sell me syrup in my own cans cheaper than i could buy it.

for this stuff i just pour two gallons of water into a big cooking pot, then pour in about 15  pounds of sugar. that will give me three full gallon cans of medium density syrup.

im doing all i can to make these bees fat for the winter, so im feeding them even though theres still a honey flow. i want them to have forty or fifty pounds of stores going into the winter. then in the spring, ill be feeding em again.

these deep supers are all destined for brood chambers. i collect honey in shallower boxes, and dont mix the tw. that way the pesticides and such that i use in the brood nests never contaminate the supers that ill be using for honey.


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

Tank

If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

billy rubin

bees are like that

amazing things just to watch and study

lots harder to keep than before parasites and pesticides


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

Icarus

Some dogs have a keen sense of humor. My Irish setter, Molly, was cleverly inventive with some of the stunts that she pulled. All were harmless and most of them were hilarious.

https://imgur.com/gallery/C9JuKVO

Tank

I absolutely love that dog!!!
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

billy rubin

headed to a well pad yesterday



turkeys and white tailed deer. we used to raise turkeys but bands like this one always picked em off and they ran into the woods, never to return


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

hermes2015

"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."
― Charles Eames

Dark Lightning

We took our rescue mutt to the vet yesterday for tooth cleaning. They took a couple out. At least this time the vet didn't guilt us about her teeth. We got her 5 years ago from the pound, at about age 5. We of course had no control over those years. It's amusing how calm and sweet she is at home, compared to the Mr. Hyde performance she gives at the vet.  :D