Snugging Down the Bees

'Tis the (goose egg) season says Liz with this
picture posted onto facebook.

We are still thoroughly enjoying this lovely run of windless, rainless days, often with bright blue skies and welcome sunshine begotten of the series of high pressure systems which are dominating our weather for what feels like a fortnight. It has given us a lovely flush of crops hanging in there which by now (mid October) we'd normally expect to have finished - the broad beans, mange tout peas, poly-tunnel tomatoes and herbs like parsley, chives and thyme.

Our first grass-frost on 13th October morning.

We have welcome late (re) flushes of some flowers which you'd normally call summer flowers - all the roses are still pushing open new buds, a yellow geum is going great guns and our three-big-tub group in the yard is a picture of yellow red-hot pokers, yellow dahlia (a 'Bishop' relative), nasturtiums and Welsh poppies. In the keyhole bed an accidental self-seeded red campion has been flowering away as a bush-sized dome since June and shows no sign of flagging.

Frosty sunrise through the trees

As I said, we have been enjoying the warm sunshine, but clear skies and high pressure in October inevitably means the arrival of chilly nights and some first frosts. The first crunch to the grass came this morning with a mist-less morning live-stock round. The internet tells us we might even get views of the Northern Lights but I have not seen them so far possibly because 'North' to us here is one of the few bad sources of light pollution, the cluster of street lights in the town of Ballaghaderreen. Balla-D tends to light up the northern horizon with that well know sodium-light orange glow and may be out-glowing the Aurora Borealis.

The bees finally get their snug 'loft insulation', the (oiled wood)
foam block filled 'eke' on top of the hive here with the standard
roof about to be put on top.

I had been holding off snugging down the bees with the days being so warm and the bees still being so active. They will be foraging the remaining heather and soon move onto the ivy when that starts to open - the ivy flower buds are plentiful but still shut tight so far here. It is a truism in beekeeping circles that it is not the cold which kills bees, but the damp, especially if you have a thin roof on the hive where condensation forms and cold water then drips right down the centre of the hive, into the brood cluster.

A chilly morning for our cattle neighbours in the 5 Acre Field

We think it was a combination of the cold/damp/condensation and having too much space (fresh air around the cluster) which did for our 2014 colony in spring 2015. This can give you a bad 'chimney' effect with the warm cluster pulling in cold air through the mesh floor, and losing warm air through the roof-vents but you are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. You must somehow find the right balance between enough ventilation to discourage condensation, (including that moisture which bees have to pull out of nectar in order to make honey) but enough cosy snugness that nobody dies of hypothermia. Our solution this year is to part-block the bottom by sliding in the varroa-mite counting board but then to completely seal the top with a 3 inch block of house-insulating foam slotted tight into an oiled-wood square called an 'eke'. I am hoping that the warm bees will then thus be so well separated from the snow on the roof, that no condensation will form on their 'ceiling' and drip down. Time will tell. That is now the last time this year we will open the hive to look into it. From now on we just watch the comings and goings and hope that continued activity means that all is well. Good luck you bees.

That is quite a hole we have made in the house!

Meanwhile over in the Sligo rebuild house we have done the complete opposite and smashed a huge hole in the back. This is one of those 2 foot thick walls we know and love from our own rebuild, but in this case the stone is much more helpful, being mainly flat chunks a bit like broken paving slabs. In Roscommon our stones were hard sandstone and the shape of your head so we wondered how the builder ever managed to stack them into walls - we suspect that they did no such thing and just poured the stones and concrete down into a shuttered gap.

Not a dry stone wall, but a stack of good stones salvaged
from the demolished house walls.

Out in Sligo it is all much more professional and 'stone mason'-ish, with the flat stones laid 'bonded' like brickwork, big squared off 'coin' stones at the corners and impressive broad slices as door and window lintels. These are interwoven with proper old fashioned lime mortar so that when you knock bits of wall down it is fairly simple to tap the good stones clean of mortar and stack them for re-use.

Tom the turkey has regrown his tail and is back to his
magnificent best.

I had to smile - the two of us had been hard at this rubble-wrangling all morning when Mum came out to the site with the makings of 'hang sang-widges' and a huge thermos of coffee but brought along young son 'H' (3) so that he could see progress and enjoy some time with his Dad. His Dad must be as tired as me from the rock-bashing but still has the energy to load H into a wheel barrow and run round the site like a fair ground ride, running him up and down gravel heaps, bouncing over boulders and balancing along scaffold planks with H clinging on for dear life and wooping with delight. H is also one for the quick observations "You've made a hole in the house!" and follow-up accusing questions as to who did it and Mum and Dad have been enjoying getting me into tongue-in-cheek "trouble" by blaming me for everything that's 'gone wrong'.

The 2CV gets fired up just to keep everything freed up and
working. Look carefully here and you may see exhaust fumes
centre right. 

The gravel piles I moved with the digger were, in fact "H's mountain" - he had been climbing over them that week and claimed them for his own. "That was Matt!", they grassed me up helpfully "He stole it with the digger!" He wasn't so accepting of the blame for the hole in the house. "I think it is BOTH of your fault!" he said, Judge Jury and Executioner.

Polly and the sunrise.

He was also a bit concerned that the room he had previously chosen was now rapidly disappearing, open to the east winds but is now reassured that he will get a new, nice, bigger room 'upstairs' eventually. If Dad and I don't get arrested for stealing Sligo's mountains in the meantime.

...and Three Meteors and a Bat!

Picture by Leah Burgess, used with permission.

One thing that surprises and delights us about our move to rural Ireland (from urban Kent) is the clear, unpolluted air and almost complete absence of light pollution so that our night skies are more spectacular than we even dreamed of in Kent. Better too than I remember from anywhere else I have lived. I was used to us being able to see Orion and The Plough if we were lucky, but now we can see so many gazillions of smaller stars on a clear night that it can actually be difficult to pick out those well known constellations. We can see the Milky Way from here, a feature I think I never saw in Kent.

Spider web in the Bramley tree catching some evening sun.

These 'Nights of a Million Stars' (as we call them) used to be a feature of our nights spent in the caravan during the house build; we'd wander out of the caravan to use phones or for a 'comfort stop' , to have our bonfires or to get out of the way while meals were being cleared away or the furniture re-arranged from seats into beds. To start with we had no electricity, so 'light' was candles or oil lamps in the caravan, the 'grounds' were black-dark and the stars massed above just shouted out to be gazed at in wonder.

Quince tree doing very well. No fruit yet but plenty of growth.

So our minds are always alert for interesting 'space' and astronomy stories to follow up - internet posts about the International Space Station, interesting planetary conjunctions, the solar eclipse earlier in the year (OK, that was a daytime one), unusually large or bright moons, comets, the Northern Lights and so on. We are always game for a middle-of-the-night alarm call and a dressing-gown clad wander round the dark front garden with binoculars, cameras and a mug of coffee. This week's full Lunar Eclipse coincident with the moon being close to Earth (a "super moon") was right up our street. The promise of clear, high-pressure skies was the icing on the cake.

'Feste' chops smeared with mushed up garlic, lemon juice and salt.

It did not disappoint. The alarm woke me at 03:00 as the proper moon light was just about to fail, shoved aside by the Earth's shadow. Liz had actually stayed awake reading, so was already 'up'. We watched while the light winked out and the blood-red colour washed across the moon. We both tried to take pictures but neither of us have a camera capable of such a shot (Liz only has her phone and with my trusty Canon EOS trying to die on me, I am on a tiny Sony Cybershot - it works OK on the 'holiday snaps' pics in this blog but correctly illuminating the moon and zooming in the 100x you'd need are way beyond it). I am grateful to Leah Burgess who gave me permission to use her composite multi-exposure shot at the top of this post.

The heather is well out in the Kiltybranks bog dog-walk
where the 2 new wind turbines now add to the skyline.

We sat and watched the action for a good 45 minutes including gazing around at all the other stars and the Milky Way and had the added bonus of three separate meteors streak through the field of view and I saw a bat. We were joking that we only needed the ISS to wander over, an owl to hoot or the young fox I saw on the lawn the previous night to stroll through, and we would have the complete night-shift 'Bingo' card filled in. The blood-red thing was due to go on for a couple of hours and we soon decided that a dog-patrol and a cup of coffee would see us well enough eclipsed and we went off to bed happy star-gazers all. I did look out a few hours later and was happy to see that the moon was filling back up with 'proper' light as the earth's shadow moved away and the eclipse was done for 18 years or so.

My plucky little 'Stihl 025' chain saw gets its big-boy pants
 on to start slicing up the fallen black spruce. 

Meanwhile life is turning quite autumnal here and I have been getting into some serious logging and started preparing to 'winterise' the bees. With the log store over half full now of the ash I coppiced out of the pig-run and the rubbish and old fence posts gathered from all about the place as we clear more and more 'jungle', I needed to move on to the big 55' black spruce which came down in a gale last November. This was a daunting task as my little Stihl chainsaw would struggle to cut a tree this thick and I was looking at several hours of sweaty, back-aching work just to slice it up, never mind splitting it with the axe. These trees have many side branches, so many of the rounds you slice out of the trunk are badly knotted and can be hard to split.

The 'cavalry' made short work of the rest of the bole - this took
my helper about 45 minutes with his bigger saw.

Fortunately I had got talking to a very helpful lad down our lane who has a selection of bigger saws and had agreed to come and help. Unfortunately, I knew, he had ricked his back a week or so ago and might not be available, so I had decided to make a start. I did this yesterday (Sunday) determined to run the saw out of all the petrol I had on site and just see how I got on. That proved to be about an hour and a half and I sliced no more than a dozen rounds; about 12 feet of tree.

53 tree-rings in this bottom slice which is 2 feet diameter
 and 5' 7" circumference. That makes Vendor Anna's estimate
 of a 1963 planting date just about spot on.

I was delighted today, then, when my man breezed in and hefted a 20 inch cut machine out of his car boot, fired it up and started slicing my tree like a hot knife cutting through butter. He happily gave me a running commentary at every stop (for fuel etc) about how to keep a saw in good nick, what was a good saw in the first place, where to have them serviced and what might be wrong with mine or my technique. It took him all of about 45 minutes to slice up the remaining 30-40 feet of tree including, obviously, the way thicker stuff at the bottom. The final slice before the root-splay was 2 feet diameter and 5 feet 7 inches circumference and the 53 tree rings make Vendor Anna's 1963 planting date estimate (by her Dad when she was a little girl) pretty much spot on. Either way it's quite a growth rate for little saplings put in to make a wind break round the veg patch! As an added bonus (again) the lad also offered to take my own saw away and give it a "proper" sharpen.

The oiled wooden square frame here is an 'eke'. The cut out
square of house insulating foam will slot in to make a cosy
warm layer of 'loft insulation' for the hive

Finally, those bees. They are out among the heather at the moment which is in flower all around the bogs and will soon move on to ivy as that comes into flower. Both these honeys are difficult for the honey-producing bee keeper; the heather honey sets as a 'gel' like tomato ketchup which will not flow and has to be pressed out of the comb with, for example, a cider press. Technically it is "thixotrophic". The ivy honey sets like rock! Bee keepers will generally whip off the honey stores they intend to harvest by about now before the heather honey starts and move hives back 'home' from the hills, starting to snug them down for winter.

Young 'Solo' at 3 months starts copying Dad's tail-up,
wings down display style. 

Readers who were with me in April will recall that we lost our last year colony because, we believe, we left them too much space within the hive and the little young colony could not keep the cluster warm enough. They died of hypothermia. We are determined that this will not happen again. We have already removed the spare (empty) 'super' so there is no fresh air above the cluster and we know they have filled the frames to all 4 corners of the brood box and first super. I am going to provide them with a 3 inch thick sheet of insulating foam  as 'loft-lining' and slide the varroa-mite counting board into the slot in their floor to reduce drafts from the bottom.

.Buildering' again and my trusty pointy-shovel
seemed to enjoy the feel of the familiar '804'
gravel we moved so much of during our own
building adventures.

This is all a bit radical and the bees would not be impressed by suddenly being made THAT warm if the sun was still beating down, but if I wait till the current burst of lovely autumn sunny weather is done it should all work and the bees should have no trouble keeping their interior at the required 34ºC. I will take all this extra protection off again come April or so when the temperatures come back up towards 14ºC outside and the bees start exploring again. The count-board also gives me a chance at this late stage to double check the varroa infestation level, which was so wonderfully low when I checked in summer.