Beautiful Weather Works It's Magic

What a beautiful sunny day.  After nearly a month of below freezing (half the time below 20 and even a 3 degree morning) - nearly 50 felt like Spring.  I did some cleaning in the chicken coop and breeding loft and moved nest boxes around.  I used very warm water for the birds bath - they loved it!  Then they all laid down in the fresh straw to sun themselves dry (after they picked through it looking for wheat).  The new nest boxes in the breeding loft were immediately staked out by a blue bar and blue check cocks from the 2010 Young Bird Team.  It'll be interesting to see which hens end up in there with them.  Great!  The two new black pairs FINALLY started showing some interest in the captive loft's new nest boxes.  I could be looking at quite the population boom in a month and by March have my young bird loft nearly full!

I also noticed the bees were out so I finally added more sugar water to the top feeder.  There was a lot of activity in the hive.  I hope it was residents.  They looked to be Italians (three stripes on the abdomen) but I had an Italian hive swarm on me a few years ago so who knows - could be robbers.  At any rate - it's a good sign (as there must yet still be something to rob, no?)

The rollers were free lofting.  I lost one Friday.  Actually, I lost three Friday but found one Friday night and another came in Saturday morning. They must've gotten chased off by a hawk.  Bad time of year to fly rollers!

The chickens free ranged the last two days.  They really seemed to be enjoying themselves.  They were stretched out on the fresh straw, fanning their wings out to catch more sun.  They looked really happy.  One of the new pullets lays light brown eggs.  We think she may be Mammoth's offspring.  Mammoth was the only full size Ameracauna we had left.  This new pullet looks EXACTLY like her only bantam sized.  And, like Mammoth, she also lays brown eggs.  These two are the only ones we've ever had lay anything besides the light green to blue-green eggs.

We washed the cars and went to the library.  All in all, everyone enjoyed the weather change and sun.  Nice day!

Fun with Cygwin and Windows 2008 R2

There was no fun to be had.  This was a real pain.  I do not know why /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/opensshd.README doesn't just say:

$ editrights -u sshd_server -a SeCreateTokenPrivilege

That was the fix.  The README above gave you some nice hints - like the word token.  Another user on the web gave the big clue to use editrights.   Running this with the -hv parameter listed the rights you could add.  I'm not sure if it mattered or not, but logging into Windows as the user and running Cygwin to create the Cygwin environment seemed to help some things as well. (Oh, and run ssh-user-config too!)

So that's it!  Be sure to read the above README and add the editrights command at the end and all should be well.  Good luck!

No thanks, I value my unstructured time

This morning's Dilbert was made funnier by the fact that I spent last night doing some free computer support for a friend.  My bumper sticker is obviously NOT working.  Maybe I should wash my car.

I like Zshell

I like Zshell.  I'm not going to detail why.  That's not why I'm writing this.  I'm writing this to save a copy of my favorite minimal .zshrc settings in an easily accessible place.  Here goes:

HISTFILE=~/.zhistfile
HISTSIZE=100
SAVEHIST=10
PATH=~username/jdk1.6.0_17/bin:$PATH
JAVA_HOME=~username/jdk1.6.0_17
RPROMPT=' %~'
bindkey -e
zstyle :compinstall filename '/home/username/.zshrc'
autoload -Uz compinit
compinit

Honey Harvest

It wasn't as much as I wanted - 5 full capped frames (although one of them was about double - so nearly 6 frames).  But it was MUCH, much more than last year.  It's over 30 pounds! That will last us a while!  I also added the NEW top feeder for winter feeding.  It hold a lot of sugar syrup.  I used the Bee-Gone to drive the bees off.  Even thought it didn't work as well as I thought it would (it wouldn't clear a full frame - had to use brush) it did seem to repulse the hangers-on so that after a while, it was clear and I took it in the house.  They have been pretty mild up until I started brushing droves of them off of 5 frames.  I had two get in my veil.  I dealt with them pretty quick - I'm not getting stung in the face again!  So - no stings and a lot of honey.  That's a good harvest for me.

Robbers?

Every time I feed now I get a TON of bees on the hive.  This is not normal.

How To Get Started In Beekeeping

Someone asked me about starting beekeeping the other day.  I was excited to tell them "how I would do it if I were starting again".  First off - I'm no expert.  Although I've been interested and read about it for 30 years (even helped splice a hive about 30 years ago), I just started beekeeping myself 4 years ago.  Even so, it's probably a bit premature to endorse a method I haven't tried yet, but if I were going to get started in beekeeping right now I would use the Kenyan Top Bar hives (great site, btw).  I base this on an article I read in Bee Culture a few months back.  You can build them yourself.  The design promotes health by allowing the bees to make smaller cells which seems to inhibit mite populations somewhat.  Also, the act of harvesting removes comb so that you do not have old tracked up comb that can result in sickness.

Because you don't have reusable frames and foundation, you don't need an expensive extractor.  Just two common plastic 5 gallon buckets are used (Home Depot has them for less than $3!).  There is no expensive equipment to buy - just a veil, gloves, smoker, hive tool and a 4x8 sheet of plywood!  From this sheet of plywood you can make 3 hives and have enough material left over to make 2 nucs.

If you're looking to save even more money - build these hives and nucs and give your phone number to the fire department to call for swarm removal = Free Bees!  Be sure to purchase the above equipment before doing that.  In fact, if you're going to go after feral bee swarms, you'd better invest in the entire bee suit! [Disclaimer: If you live in the southwest (or even if you don't), you might want to just BUY some nice Italian bees from a reputable dealer to start off.]


This book is suppose to cover top bar hives pretty well.  It's on my list to buy. Here's a neat video I found on building a top bar hive.