One man's quest to ranch American bison in Virginia.
Bee update
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A healthy honeybee brood comb with capped brood cells and newly laid eggs (eggs are visible in enlarged portion of image).
Three of the four honeybee colonies we started out with this spring are growing quite strong now.
One of the strong honeybee colonies (show in the above video) has an enormous population and may even try to cast a swarm this year.
Bees festooning (outlined with a white dotted line) from a partially built drone comb positioned near the entrance of the most populous hive.
The other two hives, though less populated, are also doing well:
Honey and pollen stored at the top of the comb with an abundance of brood at different stages of development are signs of a healthy hive. In this photograph new eggs (visible in the enlarged portion of the photo) have been laid in cells formerly occupied by newly emerged adult bees. The capped cells in this photograph contain younger developing bees who should emerge as adults in a few days.
A brood comb with several queen cups (marked with arrows). These queen cups can be used to raise new queens for swarming or usurpation.
While checking each hive I also added a 1" ventilation hole at the back end of the hives. These holes, which are covered with screen mesh, should help the bees cool the hive during these hot summer months. During the cooler periods of the year I'll close the holes by plugging them with pieces of a sponge.
A security camera photograph of me taking down the unhealthy hive. The hive, which had suffered a bad case of sacbrood virus had only two bees left alive when this image was captured.
The fourth hive, which was described in a previous post as having contracted sacbrood virus, has unfortunately died out. I am now glad that I had decided earlier to move this hive to a different location away from the other hive. When a sickened hive dies out there is a greater risk of the disease spreading to other healthy hives when they are positioned near one another.
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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