Springwood Cottage

26/09/2022

We are coming to the end of honey harvesting. It has been a good year for our bee friends and we have plenty honey for sale now. This can be bought from Springwood Cottage in Chorley or from me at Lancaster Street in Coppull. The price is £8 for a 454g/ 1lb jar of our beautiful liquid gold. Our bees have done a wonderful job this year, collecting nectar from Himalayan Balsam and many other nectar rich flowers within 3miles of their home at Springwood Cottage. If you would like to purchase any, please message me on 07707707760.

12/04/2022

Over night frosts have been cruel and relentless. The hedges have not cared tuppence about the nights, setting out their green solar collectors called leaves and Worcester-berry adding their blossom to the blackthorn and now cultivated plums with bumblebees and honey bees coming for nectar and pollen. All of this new growth causes the hedge to expand towards the lane, as the extra weight of flowers and leaves pulls the branches down and I have had to give the hedge its first trim. Last year I bought a cordless long length hedge cutter but batteries were out of stock and only just came in and for my patience I was rewarded by the hedge cutter refusing to work.
Honey bees have been drinking at any convenient water source and collecting minerals from the garden. The application of an organic fertiliser or from fertiliser in purchased seed compost brings them to harvest what I presume is nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, but literature also mentions sodium, magnesium and calcium and it is considered good practice to offer honey bees a salt lick as one would provide for animals. Bobby has a big salt lick in his stable. All of these elements are considered essential for plants and animals. Presumably the bees store these nutrients with the pollen they collect. Now is the time to increase honey bee numbers by placing young honey bees with newly hatched eggs (it takes about 3 days for an egg to hatch) but no queen. So long as they have adequate supplies of food and pollen, they will raise several new queens by feeding the larvae with a rich diet called royal jelly. However, if there are not enough bees to keep the larvae warm the brood dies in a process called chilled brood which adds a pause to kerb over enthusiastic beekeepers ambitions. Additionally there has been no frog spawn in the bath behind the greenhouse, but whether this is due to the overnight frosts or some other trouble is not clear. Swallows have not yet arrived.
The Mantis electric tiller has greatly exceeded my expectations and has become my tool of choice for the garden, easily able to operate on a long electric cable with enough power to cultivate all the weeds that are now in full career. I bought, off eBay, a wheeled push hoe which I plan to use between growing crops where a powered tool like the mantis can be too enthusiastic and cause more trouble than good.
I twice hauled a load of scrap to the local scrap yard, but on both occasions they were shut and so I went to a more distant one, but I could not get paid as I didn’t realise they needed a photo-id. I had to return the next day with some batteries and was given a tale and a look at one of the staffs lost top finger. This type of tactic is often used to confuse sellers so that they don’t get their full market price, but not having researched the price of lead acid batteries, that for a long time were not taken by scrap yards due to some legislation mandates, I accepted what they offered. Rob, my favourite builder, had previously told me that the first scrap yard that had been shut both times I went, had short changed him by 1/3, offering him £80 for what he knew to be worth £120.

Have a great week!

21/03/2022

Thought I would put an update on the page. Here it is.

In the daffodil woods there is a huge extravagance of yellow:

https://twitter.com/cosmicrayastro/status/1505677814099546112?s=20&t=pzC543t4R9Qg9Ib9hfQmBQ

I float a board in Bobby’s water bucket as a lifeboat for any bees or other insects that need a drink but not to drown. Last Wednesday there was a heavy shower and on the life boat were two bedraggled bumble bees. The first could be a buff tail queen and one can see some other little creatures.

https://twitter.com/cosmicrayastro/status/1505678562321481729?s=20&t=pzC543t4R9Qg9Ib9hfQmBQ

The second could be a red-tailed and here there are lots of other creatures:

https://twitter.com/cosmicrayastro/status/1505678989314174976?s=20&t=pzC543t4R9Qg9Ib9hfQmBQ

I thought the other creatures were hostile parasites, possibly varroa mites, but Joan found that they were beneficial symbiotic creatures that travel with queen bumble bees and then keep the new nest clean of other parasites. I gave both queens a little honey although the bumble conservation web site advises sugar water I had already given the honey when I discovered this. I thought in their saturated states that they may not survive the night, but they did. The red tail was trying to climb out of the bucket I had them in. I set them in the sun and later they had both vanished, presume flown off so hopefully a happy story.

On Friday Bobby looked miserable even though it was a nice day and when he came in he would not eat. Lisa and I contemplated an emergency vet and I tried to listen to his heart but heard nothing through my stethoscope, quickly concluding it was my inability to use the instrument with his thick fur, as he was definitely alive. I then measured his temperature using an insertion thermometer that I bought last year when I was ill but never used as I got an ear one. I had thought I had wasted my money but it came in useful and given where it had to go I won’t be putting it in my mouth! This all took a while and Lisa fretted that Bobby had killed me, but I made sure to stand to his side in case he did kick out, but he accepted the insertion without trouble, but at 38.9 centigrade it was a little outside normal temperatures. Some how overnight his appetite returned and the hay I had put out had gone. Lisa came and convinced me we should get a vet. I remembered the vets name incorrectly bringing up a practice many miles distant, but Lisa’s friend Katie had also come and she had recommended a much closer practice. The vet said anything over 38.3 needed attention and so Rachel came and thought he had an infection and by the way of checking asked if I wanted him to have a blood test. Bobby has a thing for oak acorns and I have feared he had damaged his liver and/or kidneys. In the meantime she prescribed a course of anti-biotics and painkillers and my credit card cried as £260 was snatched from it. The blood results came back that he was as fit as a 12 year old which was a huge relief. Their other blood testing machine broke so I have to wait till Tuesday for white blood cell counts. Bobby was good Sunday morning, then became listless again and then better again and so we hope. The medications were sized for a big horse and had to be cut in half which gave me an opportunity to use the pharmacy balance I bought before covid to examine how quickly soap loses water, but that experiment didn’t start and so now the balance gets to earn its keep.
Meanwhile, as Bill’s shoulder is still painful, I rotavated his garden for him using my new second user electric tiller which did the job in the time it would have taken to get my petrol one to start. Whilst using it at Springwood I sensed Father saying it wasn’t going very deep. Troubled by these comments I reversed the blade to give what I thought was tilling, but I had it wrong and in this position the blades went to 250 mm (10 inches) and did a great deep job. All manner of other stuff happening too and sleep comes easy.

Have a gre

20/12/2021

26/07/2021

I took off 18 frames of honey and then with the help of Bill & Joan, this was all spun out and the residuals were returned to the bees:


https://youtu.be/xlBLOeq-_Qo

We will be at Chorley Flower show 30th, 31st July and 1st August 2021. We have 43 lbs of honey to sell, and honey soap as well.
That the bees come in such numbers and such energy for tiny amounts of residual honey left over from the extraction, gives an idea of just how much the bees value their harvest. It makes our thieving seem all the more wicked. The blessing of honey bees is that they will replace most of what we steal and to be certain we give them sugar block and protein substitute as well. The bees that took up residence beneath the lead bay window at Springwood seem to be thriving and I am less worried about leaving the bathroom window open as a burglar would have to pass close by the colony to gain access risking a lot of stings.
For the first time since the pandemic started there will be a flower show which traditionally is where we earn a good slice of our revenue. We will not offer anything like the range of products that we normally do, but it will be nice to meet people and talk bees with kindred spirits and hopefully sell some honey and soap made with honey.
Having thought I identified a little owl from their calls last week, I saw a bird that fit with being about the size of a song thrush but more chunky as is the expectation for a little owl. Gordon said he also saw one and wondered what it was.

This video shows bees recovering residual honey from frames that have had most of the honey extracted for human consumption. The effort and number of bees in...

07/06/2021

Glorious weather

Only on Thursday did the eye of heaven not shine gloriously hard upon us and even then it was dry, mild and pleasant. The glorious blue cloudless skies have lacked only the song and aerobatics of the swallows, who have this year gone elsewhere, to be a practical perfection. For the birds and animals there is abundant water in the two rivers that run about Springwood. Only the plants have begun to show the stress of drought, but for the moment only mildly. Cultivated plants in their white pots awaiting sale have had to be watered at least once a day, but it is a joy to see them looking well. If less gardens had not become car parking spots I might sell more plants, but the English delight in gardening is in decline, unable to compete with the love and need of cars, but there are still a few across the generations who love the old ways and it is always a hope for future gardens when one sees a young person buy a plant.
I have caught up with the honey aspects of the bee enterprise in a week when we mourned the passing of Dorothy Todd who for many years was the secretary of the local branch of the British Bee Keeping Association. Dorothy continued to bulk order bee keeping supplies long after she retired and to host bee keeping meetings even though she was for the last few years confined to her chair. We ordered and collected midweek from one of the keepers of her stock, several pieces of equipment which are now in service on the hives. It is a great sorrow that Dorothy has gone. She got us our first bees and she had a deep understanding of bees
Ten of our twelve hives are strong and productive. Of the rest, one is in good spirits, putting down lots of honey stores but I could find no eggs or larvae suggesting either there is a wait while a new supersedure queen is mated and sets upon her life of laying or the hive is queen-less. We will need to monitor and add a queen unless we see eggs in the near future. The twelfth hive is showing all the signs of hopelessness indicative of a lost queen and no hope of another, but we have ordered a new mated queen to arrive on Tuesday. If time permits I hope to raise queens, but the gardens are a long way behind and are beginning to mutter about the lack of attention. I had struggled to get the Mantis two-stroke tiller to run. I replaced all the gaskets and diaphragms in the carburettor and then it would not start, a fault I thought was a broken fuel pipe, but if I had bothered to read my own notes on its disassembly I would have realised I had the two pipes reversed. But in the panic of desperation I ordered a new carburettor, fitted it and then pulled my arm out trying to start it, only then wondering if the piping was reversed and there in my notes was what it should be, the inverse of what I had. To prove me an idiot and break my spirits it refused to start with the pipes corrected and I came in feeling down and dejected. The weeds that the Mantis was schedule to murder laughed and taunted me. It is like horse riding though, when one comes off, one has to get back on and so when time next allows I will fight the engine again.

The national health service (nhs) has still not given me an appointment 3 weeks after I spoke with a GP on my mobile, but they have invited me to take place in two research projects. Some say that the practices get a kickback from these research programs for every patient that takes part, but I have not enough time for what I want to do to bother. Meanwhile the health secretary is trying the same collection and digitisation of patient records that was tried under Prime Minister Blair and then abandoned at a loss of around £10 billion. People who want to opt out have until July to do so. Gordon, next door neighbour, told me that most of the typists at the local NHS where is daughter and son in law work, who convert consultants voice recordings into letters to patients have lost their jobs. Now the recording will be sent overseas to lower wage economies for conversion to letters, and the letters digitally transferred back to the UK to be printed here. The typists left in the UK will proof read the letters before they are sent to patients. One might be able to see the financial sense of this last century, but now artificial intelligence could do the same work far more cheaply and at a better level of accuracy.

01/02/2021

Alien

The week changed on Thursday when the temperature rose above freezing and the rain stopped. Friday night and Saturday morning galloping horse men of a great gale scattered everything and took the water from the mud till it became soil again. Snow drops rushed to flower and in the wood daffodils bloomed:

Everywhere the champions of the weeds, nettles and dock began to grow again. My wall flowers would have joined the party, but I had not netted them and Bambi came, cropping some off, pulling others out of the ground, but likely they will recover and put on a good show of colour and scent in March. The horse men had their way with my brassicas too, battering them, but they too will likely recover, as I had netting protecting them against Bambi.

I got my tractor stuck last year when a rear inner tube deflated and the tyre came off the rim. It was on slightly sloping ground, just enough to complicate the jacking and wheel exchange. I seized the opportunity of the better weather to recover it. Somehow it didn’t fall off the jack and with my engine crane I eventually got the new wheel on. Bobby stood watching the procedure, occasionally dipping down to his green hay ball for a chew before telling me I was doing things wrongs. Thankfully he was wary of me as at turnout he had waited till just before I took his head collar off to give me a good hard nip on my leg. There were too many people passing by to give him what he deserved and so he got away scot free, which was perhaps punishment enough as it was difficult for me to forget, due to the limp he gave me, and that made him fear I might get him back. He had tried the same trick with Lisa the previous night but she saw his teeth coming and her hand found him before his teeth found her. So like the bully that he can be he got me when I was doing him a kindness in turning him out. Who ever wrote:”They never bite the hand that feeds them, didn’t know Bobby.” Later he tried to get a mother as she was showing her daughter what a fine horse he was. Lisa has a theory that its the full moon that brings on his nipping, but then again she did snowball him till he was vexed and plotting revenge:

https://youtu.be/hxuH5iBfMDo

My bird feeding stall was complemented by Gordon who put food on one of the Elm stumps that he left at bird feeding height further up the lane after the dead Elm’s were felled. I printed off a note for him describing it has a Public Bird Feeder and the kind folk who walk by have been leaving food for the birds. All the birds that were here when the winter started seem to have come through so far and on the odd good evening they are practising their songs. Very occasionally we get Mistle Thrush which are some of the first birds to nest, often starting early in February, but I have seen none recently and so the stick carrying and nest building won’t begin till later next month, hopefully timed so that the babies are ready when insect numbers have risen. The honey bees seem to have mostly come through the winter and they were surprisingly active when I put repaired roofs on hives:

https://youtu.be/-xjfqQBEKbY

Shows how to waterproof national bee hive roofs.

26/10/2020

Extra night

UK clocks went back this morning. We have extra dark from 1/4 to five rather than 1/4 to six in the evening with that hour of light scooted to the morning. Folk have baulked at this all my life, noting that the original rational that farmers needed the extra day light was ridiculous in the days of electric lamps, but… With the continuing blessing of a mild October we now have beautiful fall foliage. Lisa who does not normally comment on such things is taken with it this year. I keep wanting to remember that there were few fall colours when I was a child, but was that really so? I can remember Mother anxiously looking for the street lights when Father was due home from work. The pea-souper fogs stole that light hiding the street lights and one became disorientated and needed a scarf over ones mouth to filter out the coal combustion products in the air. Driving was often about following the lights of the car in front and whoever was at the front had to go slowly to know where the road stopped and the kerb started. There were stories of one car following another into their parking spot. Perhaps it was not that the trees did not have the foliage, but that the light was filtered differently. I do remember the big falls of leafs and the joy I had walking through them and the winters seemed much colder then. Ice on the inside of my bedroom windows was a regular winter phenomenon and when ever the coke fired Rayburn didn’t burn through the night, the mornings were hard and I can recall my teeth chattering on one cold morning as I shivered to warm. Warm milk and Weetabix was a breakfast I remember, one that I have not had in ages. The Sumner brothers, whose Mother, said that my Mother helped raise, pointed out that a generic Weetabix could be bought for less, but I hated that it had no added sugar. The family had various other economies including the buying of broken biscuits from Woolworths. Something I did till Mother decided they were not wholesome. I spent part of one Christmas with them and was amazed at all the expensive toys like a Scalextric electric car racing toy, which they abused, that they got and how both parents left them to go drinking in “The Green Man Still.” For many years I stopped taking much breakfast and then I began to follow Father with porridge oats and hot water and that has become my year round breakfast, sometimes with a spoon of jam.

My attempts to create printed circuit boards with my CNC router hit trouble. I broke the router holder inadvertently abusing it and several attempts to 3D print it failed. Using a ruler and a feeler gauge I found that the printer build plate was bowed. The heated portion of this is a piece of aluminium about 300x300 mm (12x12 inch) that has two big solder connections and at this point I found that my soldering station worked only intermittently. Taking it apart I eventually stumbled on a broken circuit board, probably done when I got the wires tangled and it flew to the floor. I have put my other irons away so well that after hours I still could not find them and eventually bought another, got the build plate off and pushed it back to roughly flat. To my surprise the glass cover plate was also buckled. How glass bends I have no idea, but it is safety glass and the guy at the glass shop said this toughening might have induced the bend. He was reluctant to sell me a piece of 4 mm window glass but I noted only I was using it and so he finally agreed. This was as flat as a mill pond and I was able to print the broken CNC spindle holder. Then I taught the CNC to carve the less ugly witches speech from the Scottish play:

The Covid war has brought forth hitherto unknown politicians to talk radio, most capable of explaining that lock down is needed due to the large rise in cases and yet none of the few that I have heard have been able to say how much larger this years flu cases are over a normal year. For the folk who have argued that devolution to the four nations of the UK has made no difference there is the case of Wales. There the politicians have legalised only the sale of essential items: books, clothes, bedding, electrical goods etc can not be bought, although as of now there is no examining of parcels to see if such contraband is coming from Amazon. In England the politicians voted down free school meals for low income families in vacations. I remember meeting the mother of Phil Evans who I supervised for his D.Phil. She was a dinner lady and told me that the meals she served were sometimes the only food a child got each day. Now in the 21st century in the midst of a pandemic, we are too poor to feed the children from low income families.

Have a great week!

05/10/2020

Mild

October came but it has been mild and wet. We have had two mornings of air frost this autumn, each leaving a thin film of ice on my car at 7 am that soon went, but nothing yet severe enough to hurt the plants and my runner beans have been running and making lots of lovely green beans. I had a few broad beans too, but Bambi found them and left me very little to harvest. My experiment with the three sisters of Corn, Marrow and Runner Bean, inspired by Navaho farmers ,worked although it was not helped by the hard frost on the 18th of May, nor by the visit and munching of Bobby and/or Bambi. Still I did get some of each sister and in a better year would have done well:

https://twitter.com/cosmicrayastro/status/1312841147350429696?s=20

The sunflowers are also majestic and this bumble bee was enjoying her dining:

https://twitter.com/cosmicrayastro/status/1312843521099956225?s=20

Saturday was rain all day and Bobby did not appreciate it at all. I delayed turn out and as soon as he got to the paddock he wanted to come back in, but was refused. He gave me the eye and whinn and looked miserable:

https://twitter.com/cosmicrayastro/status/1312845809105465352?s=20

I texted Lisa to ask if I should bring Bobby in early and she agreed, but hoped to re-arrange her schedule so that she could get him. I was completing stable service early in the afternoon when she arrived in clothing suitable for the weather, having been out walking Bernie, a huge dog that is more like a pony than a hound. Bobby was ambivalent. He was pleased to see her, but vexed that he had been forced to stand out in the rain. For several minutes he refused to come to her and not even a carrot was enough of a reward, but Lisa persisted and eventually grabbed him and he came in without further protest. While Lisa saw to Bobby I “sandbagged” (bags of stable empty) the slope leading to his stable and although much more rain came his stable stayed dry and I got no more complaints. Earlier he told me that he had eaten 44 Stud Muffins and that meant there was only 1 left and with a menacing glare asked if I had ordered more. I had to lie before skulking indoors to order another 45 and I have been practicing lying about the delay in arrival due to Covid, and keeping out of his way.

We completed the honey harvest (aka honey thieving) this week and the honey has now all been processed. I woke up with a bit of a head cold and so kept away from the process, not wishing to infect Bill or Joan. After a late surge in activity the lovely honey bees gave us 170 lbs (77 kg); a fabulous result given the poor summer. This was one of the last honey raids of 2020:

https://youtu.be/J_tSrX1p8Ro

My new bandsaw motor arrived, it fit as a direct replacement and the bandsaw has been busied cutting wood which I need to warm the house and keep the damp at bay. There is a delight in sitting by a wood burner and being warmed by the released stored sun light energy from years ago, but the getting of the wood is a chore of winter that is absent in summer, although I prefer to think of it has useful exercise with out having to pay to use a gym, now with the added bonus of reduced potential exposure to Covid-19.

Prior to Prime Ministers questions on Wednesday, the speaker gave a prepared statement strongly critical of how the present government has been treating parliament. I wrote to the speaker last week urging him to use his influence to rein in this government who were invoking emergency powers to bypass the elected chamber. My letter probably never reached him given his workload, but enough important folk must have been similarly vexed that he did intervene. There has been an improvement in testing according to Lisa. One of her team had been exposed and was thankfully given a not infected result very quickly and so maybe the shambles is declining. When I was much younger and watching documentaries about how the UK responded in the second war, my Mother said it was very different in practice, far more shambolic than was presented and with much depending on who you knew. The famous comedian Spike Milligan, often reflected on various disasters that he witnessed in one case losing a piece of artillery that went down a hill side and popping his head into a tent that contained another famous comedian (Harry Secome) to ask if anyone had seen a gun going by. He would often ask; “How did we win?” In the by and by the historians may describe the UK’s response to Covid-19 as being text book. The folk who win wars write the histories.

Have a great week!

“Three sisters:”