tl;dr: oneTesla sent me something expensive by mistake, I told them, got no reply, and 9 months later they want me to pay for it. I think their ethics are screwy and I want to know if it happened to you.

Standards are high at the annual Christmas lights event. It’s important that every entry is a strong in order to outperform the competition.

Inspecting a beehive is the central mystical ritual of beekeeping. Seeing the bees at work, spotting the queen scuttling around and appraising the hard work they are all doing is, I’ll be honest, one of the major draws for me. It’s something that should be done as infrequently as possible because it disrupts the hive, stresses the bees and interferes with the environmental conditions that they’re trying to maintain. At the height of inspection season no more than once every few days.

Beekeepers go to great lengths not to damage or kill insects. But sometimes it does happen.

Some background to timelapsebeehive.com

I’ve wanted to keep bees for 20 years, and I’m finally getting round to doing it. There’s a lot of nonsense going around about how it’s a new middle-class fad, but I recently dug this book out. It’s called the Golden Throng and it was printed in the 1940s.

To start with something worth saying:

**Do not feed bees honey. **If you find a tired bee, mix it up some sugar solution. One crystal of caster sugar to one drop of water should do. Honey from the shops, which is usually from a foreign country, and even honey from a more local hive can contain fungal spores which can cause serious diseases, like American Foul Brood.

Now that’s over, let’s move from feeding individual bees to the feeding of tens of thousands.

In my post on the installation of a nucleus I showed the improvised bottle contact-feeder in action.

There are a number of ways one can acquire bees. To paraphrase Twelfth Night:

but be not afraid of bees: some are born to bees, some achieve bees, and some have bees thrust upon them.

Some people catch swarms. My great uncle Ronald had a hive thrust upon him. Although I’m the third generation of bee-keepers in my family, I wasn’t born to them (the previous two generations being predecessors but not ancestors). I went with the safer and easier option and obtained a nucleus from a local bee-keeper.

A couple of boxes arrived for me at work. There was a gorgeous aroma coming from them.

When I visited my parents at Christmas I re-discovered a book. It was given to me by my great-uncle Ronald.

The Golden Throng: A Book About Bees.

Snow today. To work, via a snowy field. Stopped to take some photos using panorama mode on my Blackberry Passport. They came out rather better than expected. Click on them to view full size.

 

New year reflection led me to the conclusion that perhaps having email, twitter, facebook and the Internet at large following me round in my pocket all the time wasn’t a great idea, so I thought I’d get a phone that wasn’t afraid to revisit issues of self-identity. The Nokia 105 makes phone calls, sends texts, has an FM radio and not much else. I’m very happy with it.