Flying!

A beautiful day today and the bees were out flying!  *heaves sigh of relief*

My pink hive [the last remaining one from last year] is doing well enough.  I opened the top and the cluster is not very big, but it is very vigorous.  And kind of defensive.  They have plenty of sugar left and I put a pollen patty in to help get them geared up for the season.   I see buds on the silver maple.  It won't be too many weeks before the early spring flow starts.   

I over wintered this hive with a vented quilt box.   Here's how it went from top to bottom:

• telescoping cover
• inner cover with notch down and open to quilt box.
• 3 inch quilt box shim with screened bottom full of cedar shavings AND construction shim/wedges on top on one end for good ventilation between it and the inner cover.   That tilted the lids a bit, but no problem.
• 2 inch shim for winter sugar
• medium super with honey
• deep super with brood
• solid bottom board with lower entrance only

I wrapped the whole thing in some left over tar paper [we're using that for the floors in the house remodel] and then stacked some very large bags of leaves around the hive to block the wind.

The combination of things seems to have worked.   It was not a large hive in the fall, but they were interesting and hard working.   This is the hive that requeened with 27 emergency queen cells in August.   I tried to do splits but almost every split absconded back home with the honey stores, which they put back in the mother hive in a super I had set on the hive ABOVE an inner cover that completely separated it from the brood box below.   I had been trying to reduce the space for the remaining part of the colony left from the splits since we were in the thick of robbing season.   Apparently they didn't want things that way.   I recombined everyone and prayed a lot.  

I hope this bodes well for my beekeeping this year.  I have a good feeling about these girls.   I'm hoping to get a lot of honey out of them this year.  And a nuc with these behaviors would be awesome. 

In a few weeks, I'll reverse the boxes, putting the cluster and brood, which is now in the top box, on the bottom and I'll add a medium super above.   We're switching out to only mediums from now on.

Painting a Barn and Hay Bales

I've been painting a lot lately and really enjoying limited palette studies with watercolors.   Here's a recent effort - a late fall scene along Highway 157 in Greene County.   [Looks better blown up a bit, click to enlargen.]

We're about to get another dose of winter.   I have a feeling I'll be painting a lot more this week.

Hope you're all having a wonderfully creative winter and that you're staying good and warm.

The New Bookshelves

Our January project is finally done and it was worth the considerable amount of time it took.   Eric built these shelves on the wall around the 'will be a bathroom someday' door.  [Right now that little room is full of salvaged doors and door frames that I picked up last year, plus the pile of tiles for the someday bathroom, plus a few rolls of tar paper for the floor, a pile of assorted wood, the drywall buckets and tools, etc.]

He used birch plywood, stained and shellacked to match the other doors and trim upstairs.  

They are beautiful!   I've started moving up some of our gazillions of books.  This will let us clear out the smaller bookshelves in other areas of the house that have been double-stuffed during the building project.    Since the girls both work at a library, they are graciously allowing me to do the first pass at organizing the books, then they'll finesse, and then I get the final OK.   We are one step short of putting Dewey decimal numbers on everything.   [I heard you laugh.   When I was a kid, I had a prodigious collection of books myself and I DID put faux library labels on every single one.]

Next project:  Installing the floor in the guest room [Feb], then the floor in the Big Room upstairs [March].