Archive for March, 2020

THE LAKE HOUSE BEES!

5 years

by Amy in Me and the bees!

Yesterday we inspected the bees at the lake, these are the hives that we moved not so long ago. Moving hives is a bit like moving all the students in one school to another school where everything is different. The bees need time to find their way around, first they have to re-orientate to the new location. We placed sticks in front of our relocated hives so the foraging bees don’t just take wing and get lost because they don’t know the new hive location is, instead they take the time to have a look and get their bearings before they go out.

Then they have to investigate the entire area in a three Km radius from the hive, they need to find where there are sources for water, nectar, pollen and tree sap, this would have been tough on my bees because of the drought, I haven’t seen a dandelion for AGES so I was worried that they would be starving. Plus it’s a really windy location which will also affect the bees.

BUT! The hives are doing very well, they had plenty of stores, we saw nearly every queen, they all had brood (baby bees in cocoons) lava and eggs, they looked quite happy! We put varroa strips in the hives for their Autumn/Winter treatment and put two of the hives up on vented bases which should make them even happier, it was good to see the bees doing so well at our new home!

Bee brood or babies!

Pollen, bees feed their babies with this.

Cross combing, when bees build bits of comb in weird ways!

COVID-19

5 years

by Amy in My thoughts, events and happenings!

I know about COVID-19, I know it’s a respiratory virus, I know there were strains of it around in the past, like H1N1 which Mum and Dad and I caught when I was little. I understand that it’s called the “Coronavirus” because it is round and has protrusions which resemble coronal mass ejections our sun spits out.

The sun ejecting from it’s corona.

COVID-19

These protrusions are designed to adhere to the cells in your lungs, where they cause damage to the cells which keep your lungs moist and the ciliated cells which help you to cough up rubbish from your lungs.

So you get a horrible dry cough along with other symptoms.

I know that this virus is really, really contagious and can spread in droplets caused by coughing, sneezing or by direct or indirect transfer.

Mum is worried for the old people in our community, she is very worried about Nan who is really old and has been sick in the past.

We have talked about what we need to do and what might happen in the future as the virus spreads more and more in New Zealand. I am going to wash my hands often, especially if we go to places where there are lots of people. We will have as little to do with outside people as possible, we have put a sign on the gate that we are no longer hiring sand boards because of the virus. We will rely less and less on things from outside our own property, we will grow our own food or forage from the wild.

We are quite good at foraging and do it a lot already, we catch fish, collect shellfish, eat seaweeds, collect wild greens like puha or samphire, we have spent some time this weekend catching fish at the creek for smoking, we smoked them and ate some for breakfast, we put some away in the freezer and shared some with the old people who live near to us.