It might be said that I don't know - about honey bees, and whoever said it would be right. But I am interested in honey bees, so I try to pay attention to my beekeepers. For example, a few weeks ago they came over to check on "my" bees (their bees in my garden). This is a new hive, created this summer in the middle of the day by
stealing half of the hive with a queen egg cell and the bees that were
home while the rest of the workers were out working. I wasn't present for the "theft", but that's how I take the story I was told on "acquisition day". Anyhow, I had called them because I wasn't seeing a lot of bees, I thought, and found a couple crawling across the ground and unable to fly. He checked the bees and was tickled with his findings: lots of capped brood and lots of honey. The hive had a tall super and a smaller, honey super. He added another small super on top of a queen excluder and commented that if they kept making honey at that pace they would need to add another super in a few weeks. He was suited up, using smoke and moving calmly and deliberately. He remarked how docile my bees are.
Fast-forward to this past Friday. Melissa and I went out to check the garden and I noticed that her late planting of sunflowers were starting to blossom. All I could think about was those huge sunflowers must have lots of nectar and that reminded me that our beekeeper had said he would need to add another super in a few weeks, so I called them up to remind them. She told me that he planned to be over by 1 to check on them.
He pulled in, rather in a hurry as he had a flight in just 4 hours and it's two hours to the airport from our house and he lives a little further out. He had his bee suit half on as he hopped over the bottom two strands of electric fence that he didn't unhook, with a small super in one hand and his gloves in the other while trying to pull his suit the rest of the way on. He reached for the wildlife netting and his suit dropped to his ankles, which showed me he was wearing jean shorts and a t-shirt under the suit. He paused then, suited up and then strode across the garden to the bee hive. He loosened up the tie down strap to make room to add the new super and dropped the loop behind the hive. Then he yanked off the metal lid and the wooden one and set them down and peered in the top honey super. He picked it partway off and set it back down rather hard I thought and then gripped the queen excluder with it and picked them both off together.
I was about 20-25 yards away and could see the bees crawling around on the honey super that is under the excluder. When he went to put the exluder and top super back on it seemed that the excluder got ahead of his fingers and landed rather hard on top of the full honey super. The top super was put back on rather quickly and he began swatting at one of his legs while reaching for the lids. I was in full retreat as I watched him jam the wooden and metal lids on top of the hive, grab the empty super (that isn't needed yet) and move quickly from the garden, flailing his arms and swatting his body the whole way out to the road. When he had finished swatting and brushing bees from himself he came over and talked for a minute and got ready to leave, until I reminded him that he hadn't secured the hive. There was a look of dread in his eyes as he said "I'm just going to put a rock on top of it for now", which is what he did, quickly.
OBSERVATION: If you are kind and gentle with your bees, they will be kind and gentle with you. If you are hard and rough on your bees, they will be hard and rough on you!
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Preparedness
Last month's tornado showed me that I wasn't as prepared as I should have been.
1. I knew that the last time I tried to start our generator that I couldn't get it running.
2. I knew that when I tried to run the house on the generator the breaker kept tripping on the plug I installed for this secondary purpose, most likely because it is a GFI breaker, as required by code since the outlet is in the basement.
3. I knew that the emergency cord I had made up when we lived in a doublewide trailer to feed the house from the dryer outlet was not long enough to reach the laundry room in the modular we built.
4. I didn't know that none of the gas stations in town kept the generators they had brought in during the last big outage a few years ago.
5. We didn't have any water on hand.
The power went out just after 3pm on Thursday, July 26th. My cousin lives a few miles out of town on the opposite side as us and their power was out too, and based on the number of trees we neighbors cut off the road just after the storm passed, I knew it was going to be awhile before the lights came on again. After clearing all of the trees from the road except for the one tangled in the power lines, I decided it was time to see if I could get the generator running.
When you NEED something, you pay a little more attention to details than when you WANT something done "just to check to see if it works". It didn't take me long to figure out that I had turned the fuel off on the generator. It fired up on the 1st pull after the valve was opened.
We found some heavy duty extension cords and plugged in the downstairs refrigerators (mid-size fridge used during canning season and a college dorm fridge) and freezers. We consolidated everything from our upstairs kitchen fridge/freezer to those downstairs for two reasons. First, the fuller a cooler is, the easier it is to keep it cold and, secondly, we only had to run 2 extension cords, which is all we HAD.
Around 8pm I called the power company, just to make sure they knew the power was out on our road; they did and they gave me an estimated time to restore of midnight, Friday. My cousin called Thursday evening to gloat about having taken a shower because they got their generator hooked up and told us about no one having gas in town.
On Friday morning, after running the generator long enough to get the freezers back down to 0º from 20-24ºF and running to my cousin's for a quick shower and 50 gallons of water, we set out to the next town over that had gas with the 1 good gas can that I could find. I also had designs on getting another circuit breaker (non-GFI) and plug and cable from the hardware store there. We stopped to get gas first, which was a good move because while we had to wait on the 2 people that arrived at the pumps just before we got there, the line behind us was 6 deep and growing by the time we left. The station had 3 5-gallon cans left so I bought one of those; with the full tank of the generator that gave me about 14 gallons of gas, or enough to run about 67 hours continuously. At the hardware store I realized that I didn't know what make of breaker I needed and they were out of receptacles anyhow. I ended up paying 50-some bucks for a generator-rated 50-foot extension cord.
Back at the house we figured out that we could run the emergency cord out the dryer vent to reach the generator. It makes me nervous as heck to run it that way because if someone should throw the main back on to the grid, the consequences could be unlivable. First on my list of upgrades is a proper flop-over switch. Scratch that - I'm going whole house coverage!
1. I knew that the last time I tried to start our generator that I couldn't get it running.
2. I knew that when I tried to run the house on the generator the breaker kept tripping on the plug I installed for this secondary purpose, most likely because it is a GFI breaker, as required by code since the outlet is in the basement.
3. I knew that the emergency cord I had made up when we lived in a doublewide trailer to feed the house from the dryer outlet was not long enough to reach the laundry room in the modular we built.
4. I didn't know that none of the gas stations in town kept the generators they had brought in during the last big outage a few years ago.
5. We didn't have any water on hand.
The power went out just after 3pm on Thursday, July 26th. My cousin lives a few miles out of town on the opposite side as us and their power was out too, and based on the number of trees we neighbors cut off the road just after the storm passed, I knew it was going to be awhile before the lights came on again. After clearing all of the trees from the road except for the one tangled in the power lines, I decided it was time to see if I could get the generator running.
When you NEED something, you pay a little more attention to details than when you WANT something done "just to check to see if it works". It didn't take me long to figure out that I had turned the fuel off on the generator. It fired up on the 1st pull after the valve was opened.
We found some heavy duty extension cords and plugged in the downstairs refrigerators (mid-size fridge used during canning season and a college dorm fridge) and freezers. We consolidated everything from our upstairs kitchen fridge/freezer to those downstairs for two reasons. First, the fuller a cooler is, the easier it is to keep it cold and, secondly, we only had to run 2 extension cords, which is all we HAD.
Around 8pm I called the power company, just to make sure they knew the power was out on our road; they did and they gave me an estimated time to restore of midnight, Friday. My cousin called Thursday evening to gloat about having taken a shower because they got their generator hooked up and told us about no one having gas in town.
On Friday morning, after running the generator long enough to get the freezers back down to 0º from 20-24ºF and running to my cousin's for a quick shower and 50 gallons of water, we set out to the next town over that had gas with the 1 good gas can that I could find. I also had designs on getting another circuit breaker (non-GFI) and plug and cable from the hardware store there. We stopped to get gas first, which was a good move because while we had to wait on the 2 people that arrived at the pumps just before we got there, the line behind us was 6 deep and growing by the time we left. The station had 3 5-gallon cans left so I bought one of those; with the full tank of the generator that gave me about 14 gallons of gas, or enough to run about 67 hours continuously. At the hardware store I realized that I didn't know what make of breaker I needed and they were out of receptacles anyhow. I ended up paying 50-some bucks for a generator-rated 50-foot extension cord.
Back at the house we figured out that we could run the emergency cord out the dryer vent to reach the generator. It makes me nervous as heck to run it that way because if someone should throw the main back on to the grid, the consequences could be unlivable. First on my list of upgrades is a proper flop-over switch. Scratch that - I'm going whole house coverage!
Monday, August 13, 2012
TORNADO!
We're not supposed to have tornadoes in north central Pennsylvania, but on Thursday, July 26, 2012 we had one touch down here in Coudersport, PA. I heard it coming. And it passed over/very near to our house before continuing over the town to where it touched down just to the east. The National Weather Service confirmed it was a tornado, along with one in nearby Elmira, NY.
I subscribe to weather.com's text notification service for severe weather and received a notification at about 2:55pm that we were under a tornado warning. Always the skeptic, I opened the sliding glass door opening onto our back deck, which faces westerly. Everyone always talks about tornadoes sounding like a train, but I don't think so. I would describe the sound as a dull, continuous roar, like you might hear when blowing over the end of a small pipe, only louder. WORRRRRRRRRRRRRL. I retreated to the basement, where Melissa and the dogs were cleaning the basement bedroom, and went into my den and watched the weather unfolding. The tree tops began circling in wide arches like I have never seen before. When the rain blanked out the treeline some 150 feet away some time between 3:05 and 3:10 pm, I decided it was time to move to our "safe room". The safe room is a closet I built in the middle of the basement that is along the front wall, which is underground and the concrete wall that keeps it from pushing in because of the back being a walk-out at the south-western corner. I built the closet big enough for our family of 4 to hunker down in and Melissa, 3 dogs and I fit inside without too much crowding.
We were lucky in our subdivision overlooking the town. Only one building was hit by falling trees, the neighbor's garage on the downwind side of us. We had the top come out of the top of a large beech tree at the southern end of the house. It fell eastward, between the deck stairs and the shed about 20 feet away. It missed the fence's 4x4 post by mere inches, taking out just 4 boards.
In the garden on the northern end of the house, the plants did okay for the most part. All of the peppers were laid down, pointing at the house; most of them have erected themselves. The tomatoes fared the worst. They rubbed hard on their ties and some of them were broken off at the ground. Many of them have since caught the blight, I believe because of the stress of their wounds. The top snapped in one of the maple trees at the top edge of the garden, and is still hanging there. Another 50 feet or so and another had it's topmost branches stripped of all it's leaves and the ends of it's branches too. The oak tree, our best oak tree, on the downwind side of it was pushed over onto some smaller trees. It leaned there for over a week before coming the rest of the way down on the 9th of August. It is out of the frame, to the right and I missed getting a photo of it before it fell completely.
No one was hurt on our road, nor by the tornado but the storm did cause one wind-related death when a tree fell on a camper nearby.
Power was out throughout much of the county due to numerous fallen trees and it was out on our road until Sunday around noon.
I subscribe to weather.com's text notification service for severe weather and received a notification at about 2:55pm that we were under a tornado warning. Always the skeptic, I opened the sliding glass door opening onto our back deck, which faces westerly. Everyone always talks about tornadoes sounding like a train, but I don't think so. I would describe the sound as a dull, continuous roar, like you might hear when blowing over the end of a small pipe, only louder. WORRRRRRRRRRRRRL. I retreated to the basement, where Melissa and the dogs were cleaning the basement bedroom, and went into my den and watched the weather unfolding. The tree tops began circling in wide arches like I have never seen before. When the rain blanked out the treeline some 150 feet away some time between 3:05 and 3:10 pm, I decided it was time to move to our "safe room". The safe room is a closet I built in the middle of the basement that is along the front wall, which is underground and the concrete wall that keeps it from pushing in because of the back being a walk-out at the south-western corner. I built the closet big enough for our family of 4 to hunker down in and Melissa, 3 dogs and I fit inside without too much crowding.
We were lucky in our subdivision overlooking the town. Only one building was hit by falling trees, the neighbor's garage on the downwind side of us. We had the top come out of the top of a large beech tree at the southern end of the house. It fell eastward, between the deck stairs and the shed about 20 feet away. It missed the fence's 4x4 post by mere inches, taking out just 4 boards.
In the garden on the northern end of the house, the plants did okay for the most part. All of the peppers were laid down, pointing at the house; most of them have erected themselves. The tomatoes fared the worst. They rubbed hard on their ties and some of them were broken off at the ground. Many of them have since caught the blight, I believe because of the stress of their wounds. The top snapped in one of the maple trees at the top edge of the garden, and is still hanging there. Another 50 feet or so and another had it's topmost branches stripped of all it's leaves and the ends of it's branches too. The oak tree, our best oak tree, on the downwind side of it was pushed over onto some smaller trees. It leaned there for over a week before coming the rest of the way down on the 9th of August. It is out of the frame, to the right and I missed getting a photo of it before it fell completely.
Power was out throughout much of the county due to numerous fallen trees and it was out on our road until Sunday around noon.
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