Are touring cyclists masochist ?

As the late Ken Kifer once said:

Long-distance bicycle touring is by nature a Quixotic activity. In these days of light-speed communications, multimedia entertainment, fast, powerful, and prestigious automobiles, luxurious homes, exotic restaurants, and instant gratification, why would someone choose to pedal at slow speeds up high hills carrying a heavy load to boil rice in a small pot in the dark, insect-filled woods alone at night? Are bicycle tourers and bikepackers driven by a masochistic self-hatred that causes them to perform painful and anachronistic pilgrimages.

A quote lifted from "triker.com.au".

I'm not really a tourer yet, unless you consider various half- day rides. But, anyway, Im taking the bait offered by the lure of hours of solitude, disconnected from the social and electronic grid, traveling, reading, camping, drinking coffee ... slowly.

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More Spring Bee Lessons

Well my bees beat me up these last two weeks. To be fair though it was mostly my fault. So, I started with radix hives; two at coastal Merewether and two on my property near Paterson. Obviously the Merewether hives produced through winter and with a bit of an up-change in the weather they needed space for brood and honey. This caught me out (Lesson 1: don't procrastinate or aim to do the least amount of work. In other words don't be lazy.) I then had to rush around buying and assembling frames. Penders Bees reported that from their orders it's a bumper season. But I really need to not be so unprepared again. Adding Supers and extracting helped create space, but I'll be extracting again very soon with my spanking new machine. Unfortunately in hive #4 the Queen spent the winter above the Excluder and it really knocked them about. Removing the Excluder (which was a third full of dead Drones) got them working ok again. ...

Swarm Cut Out.

Today's principle task was to participate in my first cut out of a wild bee colony. Leading the extraction was my bee mentor Warren Bee and his neighbour, also experienced extractor, Dave. Well, the colony was hiding in a wall in an abandoned dairy building. Two things straight up to assault the senses, the smell of rear poo (and dust) and a vast number of dead bees. In a north facing wall below the kitchen sink, these bees head cooked in hot weather. The process was to remove all the internal fittings and linings, remove comb and suck up as many bees as possible. Good comb was saved for honey extraction, old comb was trashed. Sucking up the bees was done using a little vacuum cleaning drawing bees through a filtered hive box especially designed for the job. It took about 3.5 hours. I never got stung, so I liked them all. Hopefully, of those that survive this process, they will have a brighter future than their old buddies. PS. As it happens I went to my mentor's yard ...

Spring Beekeeping. Queen Exluders.

It looks like Blogger has combined all my blogs, so reading about bees and bikes ... Anyway! My Merewether bees have ramped up their collective presence these past weeks. There has been a feaux swarm and a bit of aggro. So after a few "emergency" calls from my sister I needed to get to the bottom of it. Adding Supers is a stock response to the Spring Expansion. The bees, like the flowers are growing and being more productive and need space to store nectar. So steps one and two, were to add supers and extract honey. This was for all for hives. But this didn't solve the crowding issue and there was still some major bearding of #2. So, I read up on Queen Exluders. Truthfully, i cannot recall exactly why i twigged to this, I guess it was just intuition? Once I'd read how some Bee'k's refer to then as Honey Excluders and how Workers are reluctant to pass through them and tend to ashore too much honey in the Brood C...

Novice Beekeeper

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