And thus it actually begins, newbee with bees

Did you know that depending on where they get their nectar, the honey will look and taste different?

As I’ve explained in my first post about these wonderful little creatures, it’s only been a few weeks since me and my buddy decided on becoming beekeepers ourselves.

As per usual, my motus operandi doesn’t consist of “Let’s think this through” but more of “Oh yeah cool, let’s go!”

Usually this just means me buying something I don’t really need but just want, because in general I’m too lazy to start new hobbies. But as I said before, I like bees, and here we are.

As I said in my last post, I got myself a Simplex hive. I gave it a nice little ground layer and then painted it blue. Why blue? Well, from what I’ve been told, bees tend to have a very good sense of direction, but colouring their hive actually helps them a bit. Bees can see white, blue and yellow the best. And seeing that I like the colour blue, it was an easy decision to make.

After clearing the land and setting up the hive there was only one more thing to do. And that’s getting the bees there.

Last Monday after I had levelled the hive to my liking, had it in the correct spot and everything, I told the guy who was getting me the bees that everything was ready. At the time I figured that he’d just tell me he’d do it on of the next few days seeing that it was already getting closer to the evening, but no. He sent me the text that he could do it that day and if I could make it between 20:00 and 21:00.

Kind of perfectly balanced, as all things should be

I obviously said yes, because this was what I had been preparing for in the past couple of weeks, to finally have bees!

When the time was nearing 20:00 I took a quick shower, because I had been working up a sweat. And I had read that bees hate smells.
They don’t like the smell of sweat, dirt, gasoline etc etc. So best to take a shower as to not aggravate them. Jeans, shirt and shoes on and let’s go! Off to where they shall go.

I arrived right behind him, talk about timing.

The thing I find fun is the fact that hobby beekeepers just tape up a hive and put it in their car. They literally just pick it up and then go to wherever they need to go while they have thousands of bees in the back of their car.

Today was the same, he opened up the back and there was the hive, the little nucleus. 11 frames of bees, buzzing away as they couldn’t leave for now.

We took a wheelbarrow and made our way to the spot. I had put on my gear and my sister, wanting to see this happen too, joined us. She used my phone to make a few recordings from a safe distance.

A safe distance that soon became clear she didn’t really need to keep since the bees are not aggressive creatures at all. They’ll get mad if you steal their honey or provoke them, but in general they are quite docile.

Looking at the frames

A fun little thing with this is that the beekeeper was wearing gloves, I was not. I have them, but I didn’t use them. At one point one of the frames was unable to correctly go in so I took it upon myself to correct this. While there were a few thousand bees in the box already. But hey, look at me being fearless. Or you know, just mindless since at the time I didn’t even think about it. My thoughts were just “ok this needs to be fixed lets go”

I knew there was a beekeeper hidden in me

After about half an hour the deal was done, the bees had moved into their new permanent home and I could finally call myself a beekeeper.

In the next few months, I’ll be learning more about them but in general it won’t be that much work. The bees need to be prepared for winter, which I will do by feeding them about 10liter of sugar water in the next couple of months. But other than that, they will be able to go on their buzzy little lives.

Sugar-water being poured into the feeder. The bees can enter via their hive and are unable to drown in it due to added safety measures. They can take sips though

I will obviously go and look at them as much as possible, my plan is to open the hive once a week, just to have a little look and become more familiar with everything.

Booties go up! These little girls are spreading the queen’s pheromones to tell the rest that the queen is inside

My buddy will be joining me, as he will get his own little colony soon. Well, he already has one, but one of his own, one that we shall be taking care of together.

The only small issue is that he has a Langstroth hive and I have a Belgian Simplex one. The reason why this is an issue is because due to the difference of the hives, it would make it harder on both of us if something goes wrong.
New beekeepers are always told to start with at least two hives. The reason for this is that if something goes wrong with one hive, you can always use the other hive to fix things. But since they won’t be doing much now, I should be fine with the one hive.

I already have a plan in the back of my mind to split this hive when the bee season starts next year. And then boom! I’ll have two hives.

My buddy’s hive is a cool one though, it’s called a Flow hive.

Painted and ready to go too! He chose yellow

For some reason it gets a lot of flack by the beekeeping community, but I think that’s because when it first came on Kickstarter they marketed it in a way that you supposedly put the flow hive in the backyard and you’ll have honey on tap.

And that’s not how it works, you have to take care of your bees or they will die. There are so many threats in this day and age that they need constant care. Mites, pesticides, infections and other insects mean that you can’t just NOT look at your bees.

But the Flow hive is super cool and supposedly makes it super easy to collect your honey. Unfortunately, it’s a Langstroth hive, so his frames will be different than mine. But I’m sure that we’ll figure something out eventually. There’s always a way.

And if I’m going to be honest, if things go well, I might just get one of those myself in a year or two.

But that will only happen if I can keep my current ones alive and get through the first year!

Stay tuned o7

ISK, APPS and FFA

I haven’t been able to spend too much time in game the past few days. I’m feeling a bit ill, which is making me dead tired, which in turn makes sure that after work, I want to do nothing but lie in my bed until the weekend arrives.

And it’s almost there! So that’s good. 

The hour or so each day I do spend in game, I spend updating my orders, my factory jobs and my skill queue’s. Although the last one is something I won’t have to watch for a while now seeing that all three of my active characters are currently training a 7 day skill.

The month hasn’t fully started yet or Aura tells me the bad news, I’m in the red. What does this mean? Well, easy, Aura (the android app) has this handy feature that checks your ISK flow each month, by counting how much you earn and spend. It’s pretty simplistic seeing that it watches your wallet, but I like watching my wallet and it helps me because then I won’t have to do it.

Since the start of the month I have spent 3.7billion ISK and made about 3Billion.. As you can imagine, those numbers should be reversed. They are a bit skewed though because they don’t count sell orders, and the negative ISK flow seems to mostly be coming from buy orders I put up. So I guess I’ll have to use jEvEAssets at the end of the month like always.

I like how all of these little apps are making my life easier, I have my spreadsheets, but at least I don’t have to put everything on there. I think I might go crazy if I had to do that.

Speaking of ISK flow.. I decided to do a good deed this month.

I’m just assuming here that most of you read EvEoGanda, if you don’t, then go have a look, it has some pretty good content.

Now after making said assumption, you should all know about the upcoming FFA. Seeing that a year or so ago (might be more, I am bad with dates) I had tons and tons of fun in an FFA made by The Tuskers, I decided to donate for this FFA.

It’s a great way for newbies to have fun in PvP without actually sacrificing ships of their own, and it’s fun for old carebear newbies like me because I can actually try my hand at PvP too and I know where to find it for once! So it’s a win win situation.

If you’re a newbie, or a vet, I urge you to join the fun and blow up some frigates. The more people the merrier.
She wants you to join too! – Rixx Javix sure makes pretty posters

And I’m sure Stay Frosty will be grateful if you help in donating a prize or two yourself.
As for now, I’m going to prepare myself for the weekend, where I’ll probably venture in a WH again in search of a kill..

Anyone taking bets on whether I’ll get killed or kill someone?

Stay tuned o7