Buffalo Dan's Bison

   A recent check of all four beehives revealed mostly good news.  Two of the hives are doing extremely well, one is pretty good, and the last hive is in trouble.   A sample comb from one of the strongest hive.  On sample combs examined from the two strongest hives there was definite signs of hive growth.  In the above photograph most of the comb's cells are capped brood cells (colored yellow) with only a small strip of capped honey cells (colored white) along the top of the comb.  The troubled hive shows signs of strong initial growth with a recent massive bee die-off.  I am still unsure of the cause.  The queen is still alive, so there is a chance the hive could pull through.   A few days ago we started experiencing continuous rain and temperatures ranging between the mid-40's and high-50's Fahrenheit.  Not wanting to chill the hives by opening them to add more sugar syrup, I instead decided to employ an emergency feeding technique of pouring dry sugar through

 This post is intended to introduce a new category of posts to my blog documenting in greater detail how I live while I'm at the ranch.  This mode of living, which most closely resembles what is currently called "off-grid living," was not planned.  Rather, our opting for an off-grid ranch emerged out of converging circumstances.  The high price of land near urban areas and the desire to save money led us to purchase property in a remote area several hours drive from our home in northern Virginia.  This great distance between ranch and home made a daily commute between the locations impractical and this, in turn, required us to establish a temporary structure (i.e. the camper trailer) in which I could sleep at night while I was at the ranch.  Later, as we began to build the ranch, the need for a small amount of electricity became apparent and, because the cost of solar panels was cheaper than paying for a power line to be extended to our remote location, we ended u

This post describes the modification of two old giant rubber tires for use as bison watering troughs.  The troughs provide a reliable source of clean water that the bison have come to prefer over natural sources.   Last fall I hitched the trailer to the pickup and drove three hours to New River Tire Recycling, LLC in Pilot Mountain, North Carolina to pick up some free giant rubber tires.  Worn out giant rubber tires can be modified to serve as extremely durable, frost-proof watering troughs for livestock.  Initially, I had asked the owner of New River Tire Recycling if he wanted me to pay for the tires, but he declined the offer.  I selected six tires and weighed out of the facility at a little over 20,000 lbs, which is about as much as I've ever hauled with this truck.  It's a trip I'll probably never want to make again as those mountain roads with their hairpin turns don't fool around.  The first step in transforming a tire into a water tank is cutting one o

It's taken me longer to post this than I had hoped, but I'm happy to report that the post-package-installation inspection of my honeybee colonies yielded good results.  In all four hives the queens were successfully released from their cages and accepted by the workers.   Unfortunately it is rather difficult to take photographs while trying to quickly inspect each hive, so I've created a few graphics to illustrate how the bees develop the hive once they are installed.  The graphics represent a longitudinal section of a top-bar beehive. Once the bees are in the hive they will hang together in a cluster around the queen cage. The cluster of bees will begin producing wax and forming it into comb.  During this time the queen cage will open allowing the queen to join the colony. Three days after the bees were installed the beekeeper opens the hive and removes the now empty queen cage.  Opening the hive: top bars are removed one at a time and inspect

This morning I made a 1.5 hour car trip west of the ranch to a mountainous part of western Virginia to pick up four honeybee packages I had ordered November of last year.  The trip to the pickup location started out fairly boring, but became more interesting as the increasingly bumpy rural roads twisted their way up into the very scenic mountains. An example of bee packages from the last time I tried (and failed) beekeeping.  The wooden boxes all have screened sides, which allows the bee to more easily respire and scare people.  Each box contains three pounds of female worker bees, one queen, and a leaking metal can filled with sugar syrup to feed the bees during transportation.  Also inside the package is a tiny cage designed to contain the queen and protect her from being killed by the worker bees.  Eventually the workers will come to accept her as their new queen, but until that time she will need to stay in the queen cage.    It was these same features (i.e. twi