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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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I bank with the Co-Operative bank. I know there was some awful mis-management in the past, but their heart is in the right place (I think) and they have ethical policies. I think it’s a good idea that they should exist, so I’m sticking with them.

Recently they changed the user interface on their online banking. I don’t know why. I preferred the old one, but that’s just, like, my opinion.

But the more I used it the more careless the design looks.

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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.  

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I am overwhelmed by all this. On Monday our new home was craned in. Words to follow, but for now pictures will have to do.

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People do boat-build blogs. Breathlessly they document the progress of their build, keeping everyone up-to-date with up-to-the-minute information about how it’s all going. I am breathless about my new boat. I want to document the progress of the build and keep everyone up-to-date. I have a blog. It’s a very exciting event in life and I want to share it with my friends and family. But it’s also something I’ve never done before, not remotely, and, whilst I’ve been in good hands, there are so many horror stories out there that I didn’t want to tempt fate.

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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.

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