Author: dodman
Highdown
Beautiful gardens on a beautiful day:
At home:
B
Yoga enthusiast:
A swarm in May …
Two weeks ago, we had a swarm of bees in our garden. I don’t think it was from our own colony, though it might have been. I caught it and popped it into a fresh hive I had made for just such an occasion.
Today, we had another swarm, this time from our original, top bar hive. For five minutes, the air was a maelstrom of frantic buzzing. Then, they settled on a low branch and I debated what to do.
Eventually, I hit on a cunning wheeze. I would take the roof off my new hive, lay a sheet of newspaper across the top, add a storey with some empty frames, tip the swarm into this, and then pop the lid back on. By the time the bees from below, or possibly the new ones above, ate through the newspaper and discovered their neighbours, they would hopefully have forgotten their allegiance was to different queens and would happily coexist.
Naturally, one queen would have to be sacrificed, but I would leave it to the bees to decide which.
The plan didn’t run faultlessly. I shook the branch the swarm was on in the approved manner, and a largish chunk of bees dropped into the box I was holding, but I couldn’t persuade the others to follow, and the queen must have been amongst them, because when I spilled those I had caught into their new home, they vacated it within an hour and were soon back on their tree branch again.
So, I had another go, this time cutting through the inch thick branch they were hanging from and carrying it, with the bees clinging on, and to each other, in a writhing mass, across the garden, through the greenhouse, to ‘apiary corner’.
The oddest part of this scheme is that the topbar hive the swarm came from is only a few feet from the hive they’re now in; but they’re supposed to have no memory of ever having been there. I’m not sure you can put them back in their original hive, though.
I googled this solution, which, if it works, seems the perfect method of swarm control.
Squatting
While on the subject of humanure, it seems most compost toilets utilise the same preference for sitting, rather than squatting, popularised by Thomas Crapper himself. This is unfortunate, as the position is implicated in too many health problems to count. However, there is a movement afoot to circumvent this that doesn’t involvce ripping out your prize ceramic throne and replacing it with one of these (available for £50 on ebay):
Such as:
www.amazon.com/The-Welles-Step-Easier-Defecation/dp/B000Z03SHM
Or, for those who like to make these sorts of thing themselves:
My own construction, based on the lillipad design, is still going strong:
Of course, what we really need is this sort of thing in our back garden (or yard) if we’re lucky enough to have the space:
Hosepipe flam
Our water supplier hasn’t enforced a hosepipe ban, having plentiful supplies, but it seems what’s needed nationally is some other initiative that does more to stem the flow. According to these two pie charts, which I came across while buying wood in a timber store, of the 21.7% of water used domestically, only 7% is utilised outside. Assuming hosepipes account for that 7%, it means that if everyone stopped all outside water use, there would be an overall saving of 1.5%. Mmm.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of these pie charts is the extraordinary amount of water used in toilet flushing. Apparently, this works out at 6 flushes a day, per person. Possibly, the water companies might be better employed putting their energy into devising an alternative way of dealing with humanure – in particular, urine – that doesn’t involve using more four times more water than ever finds its way into hosepipes.
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I believe that in the less subtle English parts of the southern hemisphere they have a saying, which goes….ahem; “If it’s brown, flush it down. It’s yellow, let it mellow”. Perhaps we need to adopt the approach of our former penal colonies?
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there is often a “light” flush option with more modern toilets that uses some fraction of the normal amount of water. maybe this or using it to feed the plants is a better option as letting it mellow does tend to smell after a while….
Mr and Mrs
After six months, some finches have finally found our niger feeder, just outside our kitchen window.
I have been unfortunate enough to have a composting toilet located in my hallway – right between my bedroom and living room. After much lobbying the aforementioned pit of cess has been moved to the downstairs hallway. I can report that due to the excellent quality of sawdust used, that only very rarely does my entire house wreak of doo-doo.
Our research has proved that you just need a bucket, a smattering of privacy and a compost which has a lid on it. Adding paper is good but not too much of the yellow wet stuff.
the yellow stuff is good for watering the plants…
Ha ha ha ha ha heeeee heeee heeeee “doo-doo”! Childish I know.