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Thursday January 18th, 2001 Aaron was intent on returning to Tijuana to buy some of the beautiful and inexpensive stained glass that we saw there. I had had enough by then and wanted some time alone to just wander the city, so we split up for the day and I headed back to the beach.
San Diego transit is excellent. We each bought a four-day Day-Tripper pass for $12 and were able to travel freely from Tijuana to La Yolla on the trolley and on any bus that passed.
Friday January 19th, 2001
The San
Diego Zoo is reportedly one of the world's best zoos, and I have no doubt
this is true. All the exhibits looked clean and well-planned and the
animals looked well cared for, even if they did not all seem delighted to be
there.
Saturday January 20th, 2001 Aaron left early and I caught my plane at 11 AM, returning to Calgary via Seattle and arriving around dark.
Sunday January 21st, 2001 The ten days in San Diego are now over. I returned home last night about 7 PM. Ellen met me at the airport. I'm catching up on my diary today. My cold is almost better. There are few symptoms now, except I did notice that my ears were hard to clear on the return flight. My ankle is almost 100% and only bothers me a little. As I have mentioned before, Ellen, Matt and I are all pretty burned out after the long hard season and looking forward to some complete rest. Complete rest is not in the cards though, since the entire pollination project is up in the air and we are having to decide whether we want to do both honey production and pollination -- or cash out. We're thinking that maybe we should reduce the operation to a smaller size with less hired labour, since managing hired labour seems to be the major source of stress.
Normals for the period: Low minus 15. High minus 3. Monday January 22nd, 2001
In the 28 hives we opened and on which we changed lids , we found 2 dead and several that were less than strong. Of course, it is still too early to judge from the top, since some hives are now just up to the lid, while others are already spread out under the lid.
We completed the yard, and then went to Red Deer to have supper with Jean and Chris.
Normals for the period: Low minus 15. High
minus 3.
Tuesday January 23rd, 2001 It's been another bookwork day. I am always amazed at how much time I spend doing books and paying bills. I wonder if everyone has this burden, or if I am just too fussy. I reconcile everything and keep careful track of things. I sometimes wonder if it would not be cost effective to just not do some of this work. We continue to have weather that is quite a bit warmer than the averages. With the exception of the 10 days or so in December when the temperature was 10 degrees below the norm, we have had very mild weather. Jerry and Leroy Poelman dropped by this afternoon and we went out to open a few hives in nearby yards. We opened about 20 hives at The Carraganas and all looked okay. We then proceeded to Zieglers where we found the hives had been nudged by cattle and we straightened the wraps on several four-packs. Matt had been there for the same reason a few days earlier, but either he did not do a very good job or the cattle had returned. The warps there are mostly square wraps, and they don't look too good compared to our other wraps, since they don't cover as well and they also are aging fast due to the substandard material Inland used in making them. We did not set out to open the hives at Zieglers', but in the process of re-arranging things, we did get to look into a few and they were all okay. There was a raw southeast wind, and although it was sunny and the temperature was around freezing, we found it cold without hats and headed back home. The individual wraps tend to have more moisture on the top pillow than the hives with the wraps designed to include all the hives on the pallet. Whether that is bad or good is hard to say, since bees need some water to liquefy the granulated honey. Time will tell which wraps have the best success. We hope to have a researcher tabulate the success, both in terms of hive survival and in terms of hive vitality and splitting potential this coming spring. I am noticing quite a difference between individual hives. Some, especially the yellow bees in the all-inclusive wraps are spread out under the pillow. Others are just getting up to the top of the hive and are up only at one end of the box, usually the front. Some clusters are smaller than others, but our own experience and outside reports indicate that one cannot predict which ones will be good in May by looking at them now.
Wednesday January 24th, 2001 It's another bookwork day again. Cleaning up the accounts from the past year in preparation for the year end and planning for next year is a big job. El & I were invited to Brian and Cheryl's for supper. We drove up around six and had a pleasant evening. This was the first time we have been to their place.
Normals for the period: Low minus 15. High minus 3. Thursday January 25th, 2001 Eleven more months until Christmas. Another (beautiful warm, sunny) day of accounting entries, sitting indoors at a computer :(~ I went for a bike ride to get some exercise and break the boredom, and met up with a neighbour who has done some odd jobs for us. He expressed some interest in doing some box repairs for us soon. We have 2,000 empty supers sitting around in need of minor repairs, and enough foundation in frames to fill 1,000 of them, so we are anxious to get the job done. I just don't want to wind up involved all the time or paying too much. I want to get it done on a agreed-upon-in-advance price per each unique batch or by piecework. I don't want to pay someone to tinker around.
Friday January 26th, 2001 More bookwork, and a trip to Three Hills for groceries this afternoon.
Normals for the period: Low minus 15. High minus 3. Saturday January 27th, 2001 Sunrise:8:19 am / Sunset:5:18 pm Days are now noticeably much longer. They are now seem longer than they were in San Diego last week. Currently San Diego sunrise is 6:46 AM & sunset is at 5:16 PM, so I guess they still get an hour and a half more daylight in the morning. I didn't notice, since I usually was not up that early when I was there. With the warm temperatures, things are very pleasant here at home these days. Ellen had her art group over for a workshop today. I spent the afternoon helping neighbours install and configure a new hard drive.
Normals for the period: Low minus 15. High minus 3. Sunday January 28th, 2001 Sunrise: 8:17 am / Sunset: 5:20 pm We gained another four minutes of daylight today for a little over 9 hours of daytime, and actually this is not the time of fastest change. That happens around equinox on March 21st. Nonetheless, if this current rate were constant, in a month, we'd have gained 4 x 30 / 60 = 2 hours!
I'm asked about checking bees in the winter:
Some winters, bees seem to use twice as much feed as other winters. We need to know condition and survival well in advance of spring to be aware of -- and able to react to -- any catastrophic losses or shortage of feed. Hefting hives would tell us something, but the hives are wrapped and a quick glance in the top tells us what we need to know. The bees are up there by now, and we can see the capped cells of feed nearby -- or not. One winter, many years back, we opened all our hives several times to feed them syrup in the division board feeders because they were too light to make it otherwise. Survival that year was lower than usual, but we blame that on the feeding of syrup, not the opening of hives. Maybe it was both, however one thing I do know for a fact, is that hives that are fed in an emergency -- due to being light -- never nearly equal hives that have had good stores all along, without interruption. When opening hives, we do not usually remove any frames. We merely glance in. I am sure that this is a bit of a disturbance and likely does not do any actual good for the bees, but it makes me feel good, and I think it does little, if any, harm. Occasionally, we do pull a frame or two to see if there is any brood, but if we do, the action is accomplished quickly and on days above freezing. So far, I have not pulled any frames, since there is no need to see what is happening. Come March, though, I will pull a few now and then. On occasion, however, we find an individual hive is out of feed in our rounds in March. In such a case, we do move feed frames around, thinking that even if it is a bit hard on the bees, it is not as hard on them as starving to death. Rob Curry, a researcher in Manitoba was doing work on treating mites in hives wintering indoors, and inserted probes into some of the hives at random. He later noticed that the probe equipped group had noticeably reduced survival rates come spring. I am assuming that he had to move frames and generally make a fairly major disturbance to install the probes. Maybe not. I'll have to ask him sometime.
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