Happy Harvest Blog
Seriously. Not again!?
Pansy swarmed AGAIN. This time I got pictures. I heard the roaring sound again and looked out. Pansy?!! What's it been, five days? Since a giant contingent of the bees just departed from Pansy, I had a hard time even believing what I was seeing, although, a swarm is pretty unmistakable. Not possible. There aren't enough bees left to split again. There were. I was completely expecting Violet to swarm. The Violet hive is huge and strong.
Swarm catching, part 2
At "dusk" (ok, dark), I got the hive box ready. One super full of drawn comb and fresh foundation, another empty super, and an eke. The whole empty upper box thing is to imitate a spacious swarm box. So they can all crowd up in the ceiling. Then I went to get the nuc box from the woods. Whoa! Quite a few bees on the outside of the box. More than before. They're so neat. They're like lined up in stacked rows. And quiet, just a low hum. It was bedtime.
MY FIRST SWARM!
It seemed to go pretty well. I was getting bees into the box. Only thing, they seemed to want to come out of the box. It was like a really slow boil over. I'd dump bees in, they'd flow back over the top of the box. I'd scoop them back in with my hands.
Gotcha, pigs!
The night was stormy, a mini-blizzard. In the dead dark and strong wind, we went outside and wrestled the fence into place and plugged it in, then extracted the so-very-successful two-strand, in a big snarl, naturally. The pigs were willfully asleep. There was shouting, yet they refused to wake up. It was cold outside, they weren't budging from the hay nest for nothing.
Man vs Piglets, day 1
HW got home before me. At work, I got a text: Zero pigs.Okay, now they're officially both at large. Awesome.
Squirrel Wars
The squirrel is winning.First there were skirmishes. I tried a string to the bird feeder to yank on and eject the thieving squirrel. The squirrel chewed its way into the bird seed bucket.
Instagram.
I may not make a blog post every day, but at least I Insta.
Bite size.
