Spring bees

We'd been meaning to do a Spring inspection of the beehive since Spring began, but first I was sick, then the weather was too windy, then we were too busy. So it's late Spring before the hive got a look.

First thing I saw on taking off the lid was that all the frames were full of capped honey. We only had four spare wax foundation sheets! So I removed four frames and left the rest for another day.

Then I thought I'd better have a look at the brood. Unfortunately there isn't much friction between the base board and the hive stand, so every time I tried to jamb the hive tool between the bottom boxes, the whole hive tried to slide away. So I put that aside for another day too.

So much for allowing the colony to swarm causing it to be weak and not produce honey.

Honey

Last time I looked, the bees had made four frames of mostly capped honey (two frames fully capped, two frames ¾ capped. So I bought some more frames and took the full ones out.

I thought I'd use the crush-and-strain method as described on Lisa and Robb's blog.I bought a double honey strainer from an ebay seller and put it over my biggest pot. It fits pretty well. Then I scraped the caps off the comb with a special scraping tool like a wide fork, and cut it out to fall (hopefully) in the strainer. Then I chopped it up a bit more and left it to drain.

When it stopped dripping through, I put the remaining comb into my second-biggest pot to be melted down and clarified. I did this for three of the four frames I'd taken out of the hive, but then the honey level reached the bottom of the sieve so I put the last frame away to extract later.

The honey from the three frames filled three large jars and four smaller (vegemite) jars, with a little left over. Not sure what to do with that.



Nice colour.

I spilled a bit. Hosed it down so it shouldn't encourage robbing by bees from other hives. I hope.

It took me all morning (and there's still honey in the pot, and that extra frame of comb). My hands are sticky with propolis. I hope the honey's good.

Mother centipede

Graham decided he'd never use the remaining sandstone blocks from the subfloor walls of the old house, so he loaded them into the ute to take to the tip. Under the rockpile he found

a mother centipede with babies clinging to her belly. However, they were being attacked by ants and eventually the mother ran away to the remaining rocks, leaving he babies to their fate.

More bees

Today we drove to the small town of Vittoria, between Bathurst and Orange, to pick up our bees. All the way there were white butterflies flitting across the road, but we only hit one on the whole trip.

The bees were being sold in carboard boxes from the back of a truck (which I stupidly forgot to photograph). We had lunch at the cafe out front, then drove on down the track to where the truck was parked. They handed over our box and we put it in the boot, with one seat-back down so the air-con would keep the bees cool. We drove with the windows open for a while to let a few loose bees escape.



At dusk we began to move the bees to their new home. I'd spent an hour yesterday shredding paperbark to put in the smoker. Graham is much better at lighting a smoker than I am. I donned my beekeeping outfit, removed the beehive lid and measured how many frames I had to remove to fit the box in. I smoked the outside of the box, then removed the lid and smoked the inside. The queen cage was wired inside the box so I unwound the wire and pulled it out. It took a while to figure out how to open the cage, but between us Graham and I managed it. I hooked the wire over the top of one of the remaining frames. Put the lid back on and we were done.




Graham was very brave taking these photos, as he was dressed only in shorts, thongs and t-shirt, and several bees landed on him.

Bee weekend

As part of the OTEN course on beekeeping, I had to attend a practical session at the bee garden at Sutherland. Looking at the list of things I had to be able to do, I was rather concerned as I'd only been to a couple of field days at the North Shore Beekeepers bee garden, and never actually worked with the bees myself.

Three of us were at the practical session, and I think I had the most experience of the lot. I managed to light a smoker, open a hive, locate the queen, mark a drone, graft day-old larvae into queen cells, pick up a branch holding a swarm, and not get stung once.

Winter garden

Despite the cold, the garden is doing pretty well. A lot of rain has probably helped.

Yellow button flowers (I don't know their name):


Thryptomene:


Brachyscome daisies:


Anigozanthos "Rampaging Roy Slaven":


The grass seeds Graham planted some weeks ago have finally started sprouting.

Sourdough

I've been trying and trying to make sourdough bread, with limited success. I've done a few passable semi-sourdough loaves (sourdough with added yeast), but when I tried plain sourdough it would sit for days, barely rising at all. When I gave up and added a bit of yeast it rose, but it was so sour it wasn't really nice.

Then Deb sent me a little bag of sourdough starter from Yoke Mardewi. I fed it over a few days then made a loaf with some of it and some of mine (because there wasn't much of Yoke's yet). Kept it warm in the car and hooray! beautiful sourdough bread.

Possums

Louka requested a possum-feeding table, with a bridge to the paperbark tree in the park. We put a carrot there the other night.


You can see the stripe of furless skin on the underside of the possum's tail in this photo.

Fungi

With the recent bout of rainy weather, lots of fungi have sprouted up.

I especially liked this cheeky toadstool peeking out from a tree trunk.

Birds and bees

Apparently bees in a swarm don't sting, because they're not defending a hive.

See?

And we'd been blaming possums, but this morning I saw a currawong at the tomatoes, and here is the result:

Focussing

One of the difficulties with a microscope is the lack of depth of field. So I thought I'd try out this free software that Graham found. I found some seaweed at the beach today and took a series of snapshots with different focus:

I loaded them into CZM and selected Macro > Do Stack. And this is what I got:

Not bad, I reckon, though it's done something funny at the bottom.

Sea bug

This morning we went to the beach straight after breakfast. There was a surf carnival on so the only part of the beach available was a small strip at the end near the rock pools. But we had a nice dip and found lots of interesting sea creatures: crabs scuttling over rocks, hermit crabs crawling over each other, blackberry shells that we could move to new spots on the rocks, green and red sea anemones that tried to suck in our fingers and toes, little fish darting around in the rock pools. And on the beach, a tiny bug making a track in the wet sand. I put it in a jar with a little sand and water and brought it home.

Here are a couple of its legs:

Here you can see one of its eyes:

Podargus

Louka and I were walking through the trees in the park collecting feathers when we saw something sitting on the path in front of us. It was clearly the bird that had dropped most of the feathers: a tawny frogmouth. It watched as we got quite close to it, and I wondered if it was injured. Then when we tried to go around it, it flew to the nearest branch.

Happy Golden Wedding!

Dear Mum and Dad,

We would like to give you a holiday for your anniversary present. Here are some suggestions:

Paperbark Camp at Jervis Bay

Wollumbin Palms Retreat at Mt Warning

Smoky Cape Lighthouse near South West Rocks

Green Cape Lighthouse in Ben Boyd National Park

Sugarloaf Point Lighthouse at Seal Rocks

Binna Burra at Lamington National Park

O'Reillys at Lamington National Park

We would like the cost of the holiday to be around $2000, and the holiday to be taken within the year if convenient.

Microscope back in action

I finally dug out the microscope and all its accoutrements last week, and on a trip to the beach with Louka collected some seawater to look at. Nothing to see at all, which was rather disappointing. Next day I collected some hair-like seaweed from the rockpools:

and a small pink jellyfish washed up on the sand:

Graham contributed an unidentified leaf:

and a spider's exoskeleton:

I also looked at the wing of a dead moth I'd found ages ago:

The software for the dino-eye camera doesn't work on my new computer, but the software for the built-in webcam does, so all is well.