New Equipment!

Milano is looking so good.  I did an inspection and swapped the brood frames this past weekend.  Milano may be a bit honey bound.  I gave them a Illinois honey super and they are working it pretty good.  I moved the two brood frames out that had queen cells and put them in Sicily.

Venice is doing as well or better than Milano did last year and Milano was a (naturally) spliced hive!  Venice is in my old, original Dadant starter hive with the solid bottom board.  It's in the 90's now and supposed to be 95 this weekend so I have a new screen bottom board and slatted bottom to add to them (I also ordered a copper gable roof that has a vented attic from BetterBee but it didn't come in).  I'm impressed with these guys.  I will add a shallow super to them before July, I'm sure!

I also bought some top feeders for Venice and Sicily as well as some Honey-B-Healthy (for the first time).  It smells like lemon pledge.  I added to the feeders on Sicily and Venice.  I hope Milano doesn't get to it (Sicily's pretty weak) since I've already added the supers there.  I've also been feeding Venice and Sicily pollen patties.  It really seems to be going well in Venice.  I'm not expecting any honey from Sicily - I just want to see them get large enough to winter.

Here's is the medium brood frame I gave Sicily.  I only moved 2 frames.  Next time I will move 4 frames and also swap places with the old hive.  I hope to make 3 top bar hive for next year.

Simple Things Made Hard

I am using CentOS 5.6 as my desktop so it serves me right.  I really like CentOS though - even though it may not have all the fluff of Fedora or Ubuntu.  I have Xen running with Windows 7 and Fedora 14.  I loaded Fedora to try out Red Hat's 389 Directory.  I wanted to keep CentOS as vanilla as possible.  Here it is day 2 and I'm adding a non-standard repository to get my external 1TB hard drive to work. 

It took me a while to figure this out so I thought I'd better record it.  The issue was the ext. drive was ntfs-3g and CentOS didn't support it.  So I set up /etc/fstab to do this "mount -t ntfs -o defaults /dev/sdb1 /usbdrive" and then ...

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
# wget http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
# wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-#release0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm
# rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.i386.rpm
# rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm 
# yum install -y --enablerepo=rpmforge ntfs-3g
# mount /usbdrive

Ta-dahhh!

Success with Splitting?

I finally caught some bees carrying pollen entering the hive I put the two frames (containing queen cells) in.  It's a pretty weak hive but it looks like it may be a success.  I will give them pollen patties and check for brood on the next good inspection day.

More Fun With Xen

My colleague presented me with a poser: Lost password on Xen guest - What do you do?  What I normally do is, of course, mount the file system, edit the /etc/passwd (shadow file) and restart without a root password - quickly resetting it once back in.  Of course, with all the virtualization - what do you do?  I tried just mounting the /var/lib/xen/vutil.img file - no luck.  Then someone said try 

# losetup -f /var/lib/xen/images/vutil.img

I did but still couldn't get /dev/loop0 to mount.  So I tried another tip - this got me closer:

# kpartx -av /dev/loop0

This created /dev/mapper/loop0p1 and /dev/mapper/loop0p2. I really wanted to immediately mount the root partition so I tried the loop0p2 which was obviously larger.  p1 was probably /boot, I thought - it was.  Eventually, I realized p1 would be useful after all.  Since I couldn't get p2 to mount, I mounted p1, edited the grub.conf to include a single user mode boot option and then ran:

# xm create -c vutil

The -c makes it go directly to the console where the grub menu was displayed.  I picked my new single user mode boot option and "Ta-Dah!"  Whew!  

Thanks a bunch to the Xen Users mailing list.  They gave me a lot of great info (especially that last one).  I'm still not sure why I couldn't mount the file. It may be because I did not create a separate LVM filesystem for my guest.  I'm new to Xen - still have a lot of experimenting to do.

Splitting Hive Experiment

It was supposed to be 78 and partly cloudy.  Instead, it was 67 and was drizzling off and on.  Now it was supposed to get up to 74 but the next few days would be colder SO I just went ahead and went for it!  I removed the top cover, nice calm bees - I removed the inside lid - still calm.

So, I removed the sugar water feeder and the  medium honey super I had added a few weeks ago.  I wasn't real impressed with the progress they had made.  The next hive body was pretty tough.  It felt like it would bend my hive tools.  I used two and kept working all the way around.  Then it cracked (at the seam like it was supposed to) and the girls came boiling out.  These girls were not calm and now neither was I.  Quite an onslaught!  I had a few hundred covering me and 30 or so ping my veil.  I would've NEVER stood my ground with either of my old veils.  I just about threw in the towel and then changed my mind and went for it - back into the breach.  No smoke!  Terrible weather - the worst possible combination.  I pull a middle brood frame - saw mostly honey.  Am I honey bound?  I pulled the next frame - YES!  Four queen cells!

I moved these two frames into a medium 10 frame Langstrom (Sicily) and covered it up.  There was some drawn comb in there from when I had a package in there earlier this month.  I hope this will establish a new colony and keep Milano from swarming.

I checked on Venice - it was doing great and I really should've added another hive body while I was there.  They hadn't touched the bee patty I placed in the top cover.  I will move that when I feed and add another hove body tomorrow.

I broke a personal record for stings - 8, I think.  Very minor.  They got me through the denim and so were not able to embed the stingers or inject much venom.  These almost all happened when I crouched down and drew then denim tight against my thighs.  It felt like I bumped into blackberries - pretty minor stings.  I almost wasn't sure I had even gotten stung until I looked and counted the red whelps.  It is the bare skin stings when they are able to embed the stinger and inject a lot of venom that really get to you.  These were nothing - really.  LOVE the new bee jacket with zip on hood.  I had about a half dozen of them desperately crawling around the junction of the three zippers looking for a way in.  How do they know this stuff!!

Can't wait to see if Sicily II takes off.

"Fix my PC"

I have the t-shirt, I have the sweatshirt, I have the mug - I even have the bumper sticker.  Still, I got the dreaded "Can you fix my PC - it's an emergency?!" call on Saturday morning.  Ug!  It sounded like an easy one.  A Virus was preventing the PC from booting but the kid needed to get the data.

I had them meet me at an undisclosed PC lab that I knew had good (and current) virus scanning and good VLAN isolation.  My plan was to just get the emergency data off and let them have fix the other later.  The easy solution - Knoppix!  I grabbed a copy of Knoppix 6.4.4 from St. Edward's University, Austin, TX  (Thanks SEU!) and booted up her Dell.  (It's actually getting hard to find mirror sites that have the current Knoppix - I guess because there are so many live version distros out there (but none with the utility of Knoppix)).  It auto-mounted her Windows XP partition.  Then we found the data, inserted a flash drive and copied the data.  Ta-dah!  Crisis solved.  Well, yeah, I left the real work of extracting the virus to someone else - that would've taken hours.  Besides - read the shirt/mug/bumper sticker!!!!!

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!