Buffalo Dan's Bison

Last night, while surveying the bison, I found myself in a rather precarious position when the entire herd decided to walk over and closely scrutinize me.  This behavior surprised me as, until this point, the new bison mothers had regarded me with suspicion and would anxiously call to their calves and flee whenever I approached.  Some of the older calves got their first close look at a human. The dominant bull approaching.  This is the last photograph I took from a kneeling position, which is what I think prompted him to investigate me in the first place.  Of all the bison he is the one I trust the least.  Usually he will just come over to see what I'm doing, but, on occasion, he'll decide he needs to put me in my place.  Things got a little dicey when the dominant bull decided to size me up.  Normally I always ensure I have a place to retreat to when interacting with the herd, but this time I didn't. Calves listening intently to the strange sound of a h

With the installation of an off-grid water distribution system this past winter, I thought I'd try growing some of our own food this summer in a small garden.  Because water pressure in our off-grid system is too low for sprinkler irrigation, I decided to try using drip irrigation.   A closeup of one of the drip emitters.  Because drip emitters irrigate small circular areas I planted in hills rather than rows.  Each hill has it's own drip emitter and, if it hasn't rained in a while, I typically only need to turn the system on for an hour or two every other day. This year I thought it would be best to grow things that were easy and familiar to me like corn and beans.  During our trip to Peru last summer I greatly enjoyed a food they prepared called cancha that is similar to the familiar corn nuts eaten in the United States excepted, rather than being deep fried, the corn kernels are toasted.  After some research I found a type of heirloom dent corn, called "

No. 8 finally gave birth to her calf this week.  This brings the total number of calves this year to nine. 

So far we are still at eight calves, with the possibility of two more.   To preserve a few of my early bison calf observations while they are still fresh in my memory I've creating the following list of things I've seen calves do within the first few weeks of life: Wallowing - like adult bison, very young bison like to roll in the dust.   Mounting - calves will mount each other.  Grazing - they predominantly rely on milk from their mothers, young calves will also eat plants.   Combat - although they do not yet have horns, calves seem to enjoy practicing the art of fighting with "horns locked."   Calling - each calf has it's own call that will alert it's mother and potentially bring her running.   The mothers also have a very low pitched call they make to the calf.  The calves don't call very often, but a mother will frequently call to her calf.   Danger avoidance - at a very early age the calves seem to have a good instinct for avoiding bei

An inspection of the four hives in our apiary yesterday yielded both good and bad results.  One hive is doing very well, two are good, but the other hive has a case of something called sacbrood virus (SBV). Classic signs of sacbrood virus.  The caps on brood cells are discolored, slightly sunken, and often partially opened.  The dead larva (a few of them marked with red arrows) are dark colored and partially dried into a banana shape.   The first hive I opened up for examination happened to be the SBV infected hive.  I could tell something was wrong as soon as I examined the comb, but, not knowing what was wrong, I took a few photographs, closed the hive back up, and then checked my books for information.  Fortunately, the symptoms (described in the photo caption above) were that of SBV and not American foulbrood disease.  I'll outline the steps I took to deal with the SBV later in this post. An example of a healthy comb from the second hive. With the problem in the f

Until recently, I’ve been somewhat skeptical of solar beeswax extractors as a viable method of melting and refining beeswax. I had previously built and tested a small solar extractor based on plans I found on the Internet and the results were good, but not great. Although the extractor worked, I still wasn’t convinced that the solar method was any more effective than any other method. Many plans for building solar wax extractor that I found online seemed to be either needlessly complex, extremely fragile, or including design features of untested efficacy.  Other methods of wax extraction, such as placing the wax comb in a cloth bag and boiling them together in a pot of water, seemed effective, faster, and far simpler. A Rockwood wax press from the early 1900's  This somewhat complex wax extractor is only one of several types of non-solar extractors that I read about during historical research. With all the conflicting information available on the Internet, I decided i