Buffalo Dan's Bison

Two more calves have been born since my last calf post bringing the current number of bison calves to eight.  The calf in the center of the above photograph (No. 10's calf) was born sometime yesterday.  The other new calf can be seen nursing from it's mother (No. 6). 

All four beehives are still alive.  One of the two strongest hives mentioned in my previous bee post apparently had a queen die and is now rearing a replacement queen.  As soon as I opened that hive I could tell something was off as most cells on all of the combs were filled with honey and had only a few capped brood cells.  Then I found the queen cells which can be seen in the above photograph.  Their locations on the edge of the comb seems a little odd for emergency queen cells, which are usually built in the center of the comb.  These edge cells are more typical of a swarm, but that seems a little early for such a new hive and I think I would have noticed a swarm of bees.  We shall see if this hive makes it. The same comb in it's entirety.  Most of the cell are either capped honey (on the top part of the comb) or filled with nectar being turned into honey.  Of the few brood cells remaining (all capped), most of them are located on the edge of the comb.  This is probably t

Today brought bison calf number six to the herd.  I suspect that the calf in the above photograph is the newest calf, but it's hard to keep track of them.  The following are a few images I was able to capture today. Smelling a human for the first time.  Being super-cute. So far the calves mostly seem to enjoy resting and staying near their mothers like the three in the below video. 

Now that the bison watering system is in place and the herd is growing, I will need to develop a handling system (i.e. corral) to safely deal with the herd.  I don't plan on having to use it often, but a corral is an important tool. So far the corral project has largely remained in the planning and design phase, which is an important part of building a corral.  One major constraint on the design is that I want the corral to be portable.  In my opinion having a portable bison handling system keeps avenues open for future land leasing, additional purchases of non-adjoining properties, or even moving the entire operation somewhere else. I have looked into ready-made portable bison handling systems.  Many of these appear to be very well built and would work.  However, they are also very expensive and, frankly, it's just not my style to buy something when I could easily make it myself.  The bison handling system as it was initially conceived.  Gates would be added to th

That brings the total number of bison calves to five.

The sickle bar drive wheel after a few minutes of operation.  This observation compelled me to add much more grease to this component. While tuning up my sickle bar mower for the summer, I thought I'd give the thermal imager a try to see if I could detect any areas of elevated friction.  After running the mower at normal speed for a few minutes, I took a look through the FLIR TK Scout and found the results very interesting. In addition to the drive wheel, I also found a specific part of the pivot group that appeared to need more lubrication. A loose sickle blade apparently heats up much faster than other blades.  I had missed this while checking for loose bolts.  After I had stopped the mower I touched all of the parts that had appeared warm in the thermal imager and found them to be either as warm as or slightly warmer than the other parts.  This demonstrates one benefit of using thermal imaging to detect problems in machinery: because the thermal sensor is so sen

  At the time of this post another two bison calves have been born raising the total number of calves to four. More calves should be coming along any time now. 

I'm currently away from the ranch, but I just noticed through a photograph captured by my surveillance system that another calf has been born.  I guess the bison were pretty busy about 9.5 months ago when we were in Peru . 

 I managed to get fairly close to mother and calf for a few minutes yesterday evening and take a few pictures.  While filming the above video I was about 50 meters away.  The bison mother, who had no issues with me before she had her calf, is still very distrustful of me and anything non-bison.

The bison on our ranch are 100% wild bison and, even though they may become accustomed to my presence, they rarely fail to remind me of this fact.   A most recent example of bison wildness has been the virtual disappearance of the new bison mother and her calf.  After I first managed to photograph the newborn and it's mother they both went into hiding and it wasn't until this morning to I managed to catch a glimpse of the pair on one of my surveillance cameras.  Both mother and calf seem healthy.  I may also have started hearing some of the very quiet low-pitched grunts a bison mother makes to her calf, but I'm not entirely certain. 

This morning I was pleasantly surprised to find a tiny new addition to our bison herd.  I first noticed something was different when I spotted the calf's head poking up through the grass.   Initially, I wasn't sure if I was imagining the calf was there, but then the calf stood up.   The mother turns out to be No. 1.  At one point the calf decided to do some exploring, but mom stayed close behind it.  It doesn't wander too much though before returning to its mother.  The mother, still passing the afterbirth in this photograph, is extremely nervous about me being around.  The closest I could get was 200 meters. 

This post continues a description of a metal shelving system I began in a previous post .  In that previous post I described the larger metal framework designed to transfer the weight of the shelve directly to floor of the shipping container storage unit.  This post will discuss the four metal shelves I finished several weeks ago, but forgot to write about. A number of possible shelving unit designs were created using an older version of the Google SketchUp software program with the above graphic most closely resembling the final product.  I find Google SketchUp to be very useful for creating fairly accurate project designs and visualizing the final results.  The graphic below shows an early version of the shelving system in a structure identical in dimensions to the shipping container.  Viewing the entire project ahead of time enables me to see where I need to make changes without wasting time and resources.  With the design completed ahead of time assembling the shelves wa