Solved: The Case of the mystery prints

Awhile back, I mentioned that we discovered some large hoof prints in our field and we couldn’t figure out for sure what they were.  People have animals in our area but all of them are well fenced.  I had suspicions that we had a cow on the loose but there was no evidence beyond the prints.  If you know much about cows, you know that they leave evidence.

The mystery footprint

We went up to the property both Saturday and Sunday this weekend.  On Saturday, we found the evidence.  Only one marker turned up so I figured we had a single wild cow on the loose that was roaming the wilderness looking for greener grass to eat, living the life of a free bovine.

Ahem...ladies...

On Sunday morning, we pulled up and noticed a small herd of cows.  So much for the single renegade cow.  It was a herd that was on the loose!  I figure one got loose a few weeks ago and tasted the sweet grass over our way and finally, on Sunday, convinced all of her girlfriends to bust out and enjoy a wild day away from the field…on another field.  Anyhow, the group of them left many markers so I am certain that this was the first day they had all come.

The girls...

Tails in the air means big fun is about to erupt!

We drove up slowly thinking that the girls would spook but they were calm standing under our cabin-to-be.  Isaac wasn’t too interested in petting them but he was interested in figuring out how to claim them for his own.  He said, “why don’t we just build a fence around them?  Possession means everything, right?”  I suppose we could have rustled some cattle but I don’t think it would have lasted long.  Their owner came riding by on a 4-wheeler and tried to herd them home.  Having no luck, she ran back home for a bucket of feed and the ladies traded their freedom for the elusive pail-of-promises.

Until next time...

I am sure they will always remember fondly that day they all made a break for it and lived the life of care-free cows, not a care in the world, the wind on their udders and sun on their hairy backs.  Ah, yes, those were the days!

8 Comments

warren, October 24th 2011 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Cabin, Land, Nature, WV

We were framed

We only got a chance to work on the cabin on Windday…I mean Sunday.  We framed a lot of the walls when my family was here last weekend so we started putting them in place this weekend.  Our plan was to attach the OSB sheeting and then set up the walls already covered.  We sized the walls so we could lift them with OSB already in place.  The wind, however, said differently.  We started to set up the first wall and nearly flew off the back of the platform.  I don’t know what the wind-speed was officially, but it was ridiculous-miles-per-hour by my reading.

So, Plan B…We decided to set up the walls sans OSB just so we can say we made progress.  There is a fair chance we will regret that later when we have to go back and hang the OSB, but doggone it, we have walls up!  Emily’s granddad came up to help us.  He’s been around the sun 86 times but you would never know it.  He was a huge help in getting these walls in place and we couldn’t have done it without him!

Poppaw...86 years old and we couldn't have gotten the walls up without him!

You may notice that these walls look a little different than most walls.  Good eye!  We are roughly following the Advanced Framing Technique.  What that means for us is that we are building with 2×6 boards rather than 2x4s.  We are also building on 24 inch centers (the space between boards) rather than the more typical 16 inch centers.  You can read the details on the link, but we are excited about the potential savings in materials costs and the potential for improved energy efficiency.  That and we like the weird looks people give us.  It sort of flies in the face of traditional house framing which makes it all the more appealing.

 

Building a wall…and the view out the front door!

 

Abigail surveying the scene…that’s as far as we got!

So, anyhow, we got the hardest walls set and plan to work more this weekend on getting the remaining walls up.  We will need to get the OSB started too.  I figure we will set up some elaborate pulley system to get the wood in place so we can start on the roof.  If we get wind again this weekend, I am going sailing.  Let’s see, I will need to get that old washtub and some sheets…what else do I need to build a sailboat?

 

See all of the progress on the cabin

4 Comments

warren, October 20th 2011 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Cabin, Family, Land, Nature, WV

Product placements

My parents and brother and sister-in-law came into town this weekend to watch the kids play soccer and to help us work some on the deluxe shed.  We pretty much finished up the sub-floor before the visit so my goal for this weekend was to get some walls built…and that we did!

As we always do, we loaded up the van with the generator and all of our tools, drove to our place and unload them once again (I can’t wait to be able to leave some stuff up there!)  I didn’t notice it at the time but in looking over the pics, many of which my Mom took, I noticed that we were like a product placement extravaganza!  See how many different brand name/logo shots you see in these pics…it is like we were setting it up!

 

 

 

Anyhow, my brother brought a propane framing nailer and it was amazing!  I have never used such a beast before, but basically, it is a cordless nail-driving machine.  With a regular hammer, it takes, I don’t know, 5 seconds to drive a nail, another few to get the next nail and set it, etc  Each nail and swing of a hammer takes a lot of energy so things go slower with each nail one drives.  This nailer drives maybe 5 nails a second and I never got tired.  Incredible!

So, we discovered another crazy thing as we all worked away.  It looks like a cow must have gotten loose in the neighborhood.  The prints were from a hooved animal but they were far too big to be a deer.  It looked more along the lines of what I expect an elk print would be, size-wise but I don’t think there are any elk around here.

In addition to getting a lot of work done, we got to goof around together which was nice too.  We talked about a little bit of everything and nothing is better than working on a common goal!    We also got to see, once again, just how beautiful our WV mountains really are.  The leaves are coming along nicely and will probably be at their peak next weekend.  I couldn’t take a picture that did it justice but it’s just amazing!

See all of the progress on the cabin

9 Comments

warren, October 10th 2011 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Cabin, Family, Fun, Land, Nature, WV

We are Falling

We were cruising along pretty well with the summer bit.  The sun was hot and the leaves were green.  Each morning we could pretty much count on wearing short sleeves and shorts.  We were in Summer until Friday.  Rains came and wind came and Isaac had a soccer game.  The temperature got down to somewhere in the 40s and that’s about how many inches of rain we got too…40.  Not really of course.  Isaac ended up being ball-boy for the second game after the game he played.  He was soaked through to the bone after the second hour in the rain wearing only his uniform.  Emily and I were only slightly better.  I was shivering like a 5th grade boy at a Sadie Hawkins dance.

Well, all of that is to say the Fall is here.  Some parts of Fall suit me well.   I love the colors and cider and finishing up the garden.  I hate cold and all things cold related though.

 

I thought it was probably good for my own mental well-being to find some pics of the awesome things of Fall…you know, so I don’t drink my sorrows away in a vat of apple cider (which by the way, is almost ready to be made!).

I have been collecting pics of our travels out to the bee farm and some of them really feel like Fall to me (minus the cold and misery).  I am not sure what makes them feel like Fall.  Anyone else have things that just seem like Fall?

4 Comments

warren, October 3rd 2011 | Tags:
Posted in Nature, Thoughts, WV

Solar Powered Electric Fence

Part of moving the bees to our place in the country is so they can be out of town and away from people.  Of course, getting away from people means getting them closer to good old mother nature herself.  For anyone who has read Winnie the Pooh, you know that bears like honey when they get a rumbly in their tummies.

Bears don't read very well...

Not much will really stop a hungry bear, but the official recommendation is to enclose all “country bees” in an electric fence.  When a bear attacks a hive, the bees always come out in great number to ward off the attack.  Bear fur is typically too thick to present a problem.  The only sensitive place on a bear is apparently their nose/mouth area.  While my electric fence is a little more “juiced” than a bee sting, most folks agree that a bear has to learn about the fence with their mouth or nose.  I’ll talk more about that another time, but it makes sense that an electric fence properly set up should deter all the Poohs out there.

So, you may be wondering how solar power can deliver enough juice to make a bear even notice it was there.  It turns out that the people who make electric fence controllers make a version that runs on DC (i.e. deep cycle batteries, not house current which is AC).  The controller I bought is designed to power up to 25 miles of fence.  All told, I have maybe 1000 feet of wire strung on a few poles, so the charger will deliver a good shot when it fires.  I won’t bore you with the calculations about the capacity of the battery but it is roughly the size of a car battery just for perspective (a car’s starter battery would not work here though…this application needs a long continuous  draw on the battery rather than the quick hit when you start a car)

The battery, fence controller, and charge controller

The instructions show that the fence will run for 2 weeks on a fully charged battery of the proper specs but I do not want to have to worry about whether the battery is still charged if I don’t make it out there for a few weeks.  Instead, I bought a solar panel and a charge controller to keep the battery full.

See? It's pointed south

I pointed my solar panel south and angled it to the optimal angle to get direct sun.  Output wires from the panel go into the charge controller which regulates the power going into the battery.  The charge controller makes sure the power is the proper voltage and that the battery does not get over or under charged. The charge controller also has a “load” connection so I connected the fence controller to that connection and we’re off and running!  All of the charging/controlling/shocky-shocky stuff is inside a beehive surrounded by my other beehives as a sort of a theft deterrent.

Oh, by the way, without thinking I tried to use a regular household switch at the gate to turn the power on and off.  Of course, the fence controller pushes somewhere around 10,000 volts which didn’t even slow down for the switch rated for household current of 110 volts.  If you want a switch, make sure you get one rated properly…same with any wire you may need to use (I only used fencing wire which handles the charge nicely)

So, I hope some of that makes sense.  So far it is alive and well.  Let me know if you want more details…

9 Comments

warren, September 12th 2011 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Awesome, Bees, Land, Nature, Technology

Change of address

Etched in my back…er mind…is a picture of a bad interaction with the bees last year.  It was shortly after that episode that I decided that if I was to continue to have bees, they had to be away from people.  We bought property out in the country early this Spring and one of its main purposes was to be a bee yard.  After this weekend of labor, I am happy to report that the majority of the bees have been relocated to the new bee yard and seem to be doing quite well.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  As you might have guessed, it was anything but.  Of course, any test of one’s mettle always makes for a good story if nothing else.  To ease the move, I decided we would mostly enclose the bees with screen and other stuff the night before.  To enclose the bees the morning of the move would only stir them up and make the process miserable.  Each hive got the screen treatment except for a small access ares for the bees to come and go.  The plan was to screen that final access point, throw the bees in a truck and go.

My father-in-law and I started before sunrise to carry the bees from his back hillside to the truck.  So, we grabbed ahold of 150 or so pounds of bees+hive+honey and prepared to stumble down the hill, guided solely by the sweet glow of the…yeah, it was dark.  We tried to carry a heavy bunch of bees down a hillside in the dark.  FAIL.  Oh don’t get me wrong, gravity works and we got the bees down the hill and into the truck but it wasn’t fun.  Luckily, the first one took us so long that it was daylight before we got to the next ones and they all went pretty smoothly.

 

We finished the electric fence of doom a week or so ago so hopefully any bears, raccoons, or bee-lovin’ dinosaurs will find that my bees are not on the menu.  I still have 4 more hives to move but it was such a relief to get the first batch moved to their new address in the country!

8 Comments

warren, September 7th 2011 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Bees, Land, Nature, WV

A little help

So, we are already crazy cat people.  Since we have lived in WV, we have adopted 3 cats that have ended up on our doorstep (we already had one when we moved here).  Four cats is all we can handle along with our dog, Ginny.  The cats continue to pour in though and “Momma cat”,  who is involved in a great love affair with Ginny, decided to go and get pregnant a few months ago to some gigolo-cat passing through.  She birthed 5 kittens under our shed and they are adorable.  She is tame but her kittens initially appeared to be completely wild.  I have been hanging outside some at night as they come in to eat the food we give them.

 

One kitten has made up with me in a big way.  She is cute as can be and is now completely tame.  I cannot bear to take her to the shelter (which is where the others are headed as soon as I trap them), but I cannot take any more into the house.  Does anyone have interest in a sweet little kitten?  I will pay to have her de-clawed, fixed, whatever if someone will take her.  Please…I need a little help!

11 Comments

warren, September 1st 2011 | Tags:
Posted in Nature, WV

Solar wax melter

In a comment yesterday, Ed mentioned reclaiming wax after the harvest is done.  For lots of people, honey is what they think of when they think of beekeeping.  There are tons of other things that beekeepers can harvest or use from the beehive though.  Wax is a big item on that list.  In one of yesterday’s pictures, you can see that wax capping that covers mature honey in the honeycomb.  When I extract the honey, I have to remove those cappings with a knife to allow the honey to be removed from the comb.  Some folks might be tempted to throw all of that wax away, but those wax cappings add up quickly.

When we process honey, we uncap the honeycomb on the frames, place it in the extractor, run the extracted honey through a kitchen strainer to remove cappings and pour it into a bottle.  That is the extent of our processing.  Besides making a more pleasant looking honey, we run it through the strainer to harvest the wax cappings in particular.  So, I collect the wax cappings from when I use the knife to uncap the comb as well as the little bits of cappings that come out in extraction and let them drain (as both are covered in/full of honey still).  The bees are given access afterwards and they complete the bulk of the clean-up for me.

After the bees have their time, the cappings get thrown into my solar wax melter.  It’s basically a black wooden box with a baking pan and a bread pan inside, covered by a sheet of plexiglas.  The box rests at an incline so it faces the sun properly.  The baking pan has 3-4 small holes drilled in one edge at the bottom of the incline, and the bread pan sits under those holes.  As the sun passes through the plexiglas,  it heats everything inside like crazy, just like any greenhouse would.

The honey begins to melt and runs down through the small holes into the bread pan.  Any bee parts or other detritus are too big to flow through the holes.  Honey sometimes flows with the wax but the melted wax floats on the honey very nicely.  After everything cools, the wax hardens and comes out very clean.  I pull the wax out, feed any honey to the bees and marvel at how awesome the wax looks.  And let me tell you, the smell is incredible!

So, once the honey is cleaned (and yes, truthfully, it sometimes takes a few runs), it can be used for anything where wax is needed.  Usually, people make candles but folks also use it in soap, for quilting and woodworking (as a lubricant) and for handlebar moustaches!  Honey is a major crop from the bees, but wax is also significant and just plain cool.  And what better wax to process honey than with the help of the same sun that allowed the bees to make it in the first place!

 

6 Comments

warren, August 25th 2011 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Bees, Nature

Your honey for nuthin’ and your licks for free

We harvested honey this weekend.  We usually seem to pick the hottest day of the year to harvest.  It’s not because we like to do it on the hottest day of the year…it just works out that way.  So, my father-in-law came over on 6:30 am Saturday at my request.  ”We’ll start early and beat the heat.”  Of course, it didn’t occur to me that the sun isn’t truly up then.  Bees get pretty testy when they are disturbed before the sun is shining bright in the sky.  It’s also best to give the worker bees time to get out into the field.  Fewer bees in the hive come harvest time is always a good thing.  So, our early start didn’t exactly start how I expected but we still did get going with the harvest.

 

My father-in-law holding honey in the comb and an edge-on piece of comb
 
 
 

I have previously sworn off smoking the bees and the smoke/no-smoke argument is a religious debate amongst beekeepers.  Personally, smoking bees leaves me with a bad cough and I can never find rolling papers anyhow.  Um, no, actually, smoking bees with a smoker is what I mean.  After last year’s episode, I decided that for the harvest, I would return to using smoke.  As much as I hate to admit it, I am certain that the smoker made our harvest easier.  For most interactions with the bees, I still do not think that using a smoker is necessary, but harvesting is not a typical interaction.

 

 

Brood (aka baby bees) on the left, honey on the right.  Don’t confuse them on harvest day!

 

 

So, we pulled off all of the honey from the hives and promptly headed off to a soccer-palooza in the heat of the day.  It was fantastic to…uh…have a break in the middle of honey harvest.  After 4 or so hours of  ball kicking, we returned to the honey-house and worked until every drop of honey was extracted, bottled and/or licked from our sticky (but exceedingly clean) fingers.

Click: Honey Flow Video                             Click:  Bees Cleaning Honey Supers

It’s great having bees.  We don’t pay for honey any more, but I am not sure you could say honey is free.  We definitely take our licks and they seem to be free though.  My back is sore and my arms are tired.  All told, we harvested around 150 pounds of honey which is much less than I expected or hoped for but it’s better than none!

Of course, the title to this post is a nod to the awesome Dire Straits Song linked here!  Nothing at all to do with bees unfortunately…

More info about my bees and beekeeping

9 Comments

warren, August 24th 2011 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Bees, Family, Nature

Our car…the worm edition

So a few days ago, I told you all about the fun we had with crows on our honeymoon.  You may recall that my brother and a friend had put a bunch of birdseed into our suitcases as well as in the car.  By “in the car” I mean inside the car…literally.  There was birdseed in the dashboard, in the heater vents, down in the seats, floorboards, and even more in the dashboard.  Well, you get the point.  Anytime we drove around and hit a bump, even months later, birdseed would fall through the dash and onto the floor.

The start of the birdseed saga!

Jump ahead to our move to Kentucky for graduate school.  We were in marital bliss.  I suppose we didn’t see the world around us very clearly as we missed some obvious things…you’ll see in a second.  So, we were poor and all that but it was cool being married.  Emily seems to remember a rough few years as she attempted to train and civilize me.  Once she gave up, things got much better.  Anyhow, part-way through school, we moved to an apartment above a funeral home (more on that in another post!).

We noticed some wormy things in the backseat one day while unpacking groceries or something at the funeral home.  I didn’t think much of it.  I squished them and went on with my business.  Days later, we noticed them again…and again and again.  It started to get serious pretty quickly.

The car...already doomed!

I got a wild hair and decided to remove the back set of the car to see what was going on.  Why oh why didn’t I just remain ignorant?!  The entire back seat was infested with meal worms!  I don’t just mean there were a few crawling around.  Oh no, the foam in the seat was full.  The carpet in the floor was infested.  It was a regular larval zoo in our car!

I often deal with things like that with extreme overkill.  We had a Chevy Celebrity which, incidentally, was the best car ever made!  I loved that car!  Emily and I sanded the thing down in the weeks before our wedding so we could get it painted.  We wanted to make a flashy exit from the wedding ceremony.  Anyhow, back to overkill.  A Chevy Celebrity has maybe 30 sq ft of cabin space.  An insect bomb for a 2000 sq ft house seemed about right.  Makes sense, right?  If some is good, more is better!

On two separate occasions, I set off house-sized insect bombs in our little car.  The worms remained.  It’s a wonder we remained!  I am certain that a concentration of insecticide like that was not all that good for us.  After losing on the second bomb, I just re-installed the back seat and we looked no more.

How did we finally deal with the issue, you may ask?  Well, we traded that car in for a Chevy Prizm, the second best car ever made!  It was new and worm-free!  I blame those worms on the birdseed.  I have no doubt that the seed had meal worms in it.  They lived a good life for a couple of years on all of the birdseed in the car.  That wedding birdseed was the gift that kept on giving!

7 Comments

warren, July 21st 2011 | Tags: ,
Posted in Adventure, Awesome, Family, Fun, Nature
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »