One man's quest to ranch American bison in Virginia.
Bees are back!
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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. twisty and bumpy) that made driving back to the ranch with four buzzing bee packages even less boring. Every time the car hit a bump or turned sharply each group of roughly 10,000 bees in each bee package would buzz more intensely for a few seconds. When we finally began to leave the mountains behind us the roads improved, the buzzing became less intense, and I began to relax more. It was then that I noticed through my rear-view mirror that there were a handful of bees flying around inside the car. Initially I was concerned that one of the packages may have had a leak, but, when no additional bees appeared in the vehicle it appears that my packages had a brought along a few external stowaways (not an uncommon thing at bee package pickup locations). For the remainder of the trip back to the ranch these stowaways remained in the back of the vehicle and eventually joined the rest of the bees during installation.
A few of the bees from a recently installed honeybee package conducting "orientation flights" to memorize the location of their specific hive.
Package installation in each of the top-bar hives went very smoothly and now I have to just leave them alone for the next three days. That is always the hardest part.
Since we started fencing the perimeter of our ranch in 2014, I've strove to increase the rate at which I am able to fence an area. Among the most recent improvements has been a t-post pusher which is mounted to our tractor's front-end loader bucket. This device is very simple, but has already saved us countless hours of work. The following photographs illustrate how I use the post pusher. Aiming: The loader is first positioned with the end of the pusher is close to the ground. I then maneuver the tractor until the end of the pusher is in alignment with the marked post location. This is how the lined up pusher looks from the driver's seat of the tractor. Yes, I know the loader has an issue with the hydraulics cover. Loading: Once the pusher is aligned, I place the tractor in park, raise the loader arm and insert a t-post into the open end of the pusher. Tilting: Correct placement of the t-post is dependent aligning the post along three axises,
For those of you who are unfamiliar with agricultural equipment, a cultipacker is an implement used to compress soil. There are several reasons a farmer may use a cultipacker, but, for me, the primary purpose for the cultipacker is to pack down soil that has just been planted with grass seed. This should greatly improve seed germination in newly planted bison pasture. Five truck tire rims welded together form the shape of the cultipacker. Technically this is really more of a cultipacker-roller hybrid as the ridged portions on the roller should be more closely spaced on a true cultipacker. A thick piece of steel tube runs through the center of the rims, which I'll explain later in this post. For added weight each tire rim was filled with concrete after it was welded in place. A photograph of the roller portion of the cultipacker completed and waiting for the concrete to cure. The length of steel tube that runs through the center of the roller is welded to the
Face flies beginning to appear a few days after my initial treatment with AiM-L VetCaps. I unfortunately don't have any photos of the original mob of flies, which was much worse. Since the forth of July an insect called the face fly ( Musca autumnalis ) has plagued our ranch and caused me a considerable amount of stress. It was a week ago, on the forth, while doing a routine check on the herd, that I noticed that the bison appeared to be greatly agitated by a surprisingly high number of the flies. While the sight of flies or other small insects buzzing around grazing animals is nothing unusual, this was something different. The flies flocked in groups around the eyes and nose of each animal so incessantly that the bisons' natural defenses appeared to be ineffective. All the blinking, ear flapping, tail wagging, snorting, rolling in soil, and rubbing on trees had little effect. No matter how many times they did these things the flies would just briefly fly up into the
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