jdmidwest

Sounds good. People need more camping gear.

Needs a jet boat next.

Diamond plate aluminum sheets work good. Use smooth if you want to slide around.

That fish looks stream bred. It seems to have all of its fins and is shaped like a trout that has lived its natural life in a stream.

They are a real organized society. Fun to watch work. There are so many things to do with the bees besides make honey. You can make them draw wax and harvest it for candles or other stuff. You can harvest the pollen they bring in for sale. Or you can just make more bees and sell them to others. Or sell the bees to the ones that like to sting themselves with them as therapy.

Waded back in the bees today and made another hive out of one in the yard. When they make a queen, I will be up to 10. Weather was nice and flowers were blooming, bees were gentle and calm. I could have worked them today without a suit. Added supers and did some spring cleaning. Honey is being made and hives have wintered this year better than ever since I started keeping bees in 2013. Sometime between removing the winter entrance reducers and now, field mice have been packing pin oak acorns into 2 of the hives. Entrance reducers choke the hive entrance down to where a mouse can't get in during the winter. There were a few nights that the temps dropped below 40, bees clustered up and did not protect the entrance. Field mice packed acorns out to the entrance board and inside the hive. As temps warm up, the mice would have been driven out by stingers, but the nuts stay. The bees had pushed a few acorns to the front landing board. I cleaned out about 30 to 50 nuts on each bottom board. Busy little hoarders. You would think all of the feral cats around would control the critters! This year will start to be my fun year with bees again. I am planning on raising spare queens and making a few starter hives. I plan on expanding to a few more out yards and placing bees in several more locations. I have a friend that wants to host a few hives. I hope to spend more time with them and build up hive numbers. Maybe even make some honey. Yesterday, I had the opportunity again to visit a commercial bee keeper locally. My bee mentor needed a queen and he needed my help finding him. At 95 and over 40 years of beekeeping, he is still going strong. We pulled into the keepers house and drove past a cloud of bees flying around several hundred starter hives on the road in front of his house. I put on a lightweight suit in the truck before I opened the door. My mentor walked around un suited and never took a hit. I had bees bumping me the whole time. This keeper has hives in several states and trucks bees by the flatbed truck load. His son has become involved in the business and raises prime queen bees. His hive count is over 2000 or more in many locations. 100 starter hives were leaving his front yard after we left last night to other beekeepers. We picked up the queen and her attendants in a little wooden box and headed home. By the time we got home, that box was humming like a little engine, a combination of wings fanning and the queen making a strange noise. Spring is starting in full bloom. Hives today stunk of Bradford Pear, smells like rotten feet. Lots of stuff blooming, red buds, plums, danderlions. Soon the clover will bloom and the yard will smell sweet again as they make the best honey for my use.

Boss was working in shop today and met up with a king snake eye to eye. Squealed like a little girl and called me about it. Shame I was not there to catch it and show him closer.

Fished Montauk over the weekend, it was about 6" hi and flushed. Stopped at Meramac on way thru and it was still high. Spring branch was cloudy. Lane Spring should be about right. Others around Fort Wood should be ok too.

I would not miss a copperhead either, but you should really know what you are killing. Same reason swans die during snow goose season. Funny part is that it was on a local news station, pic showing the dead snake someone killed.

Those boats are hard to sink.

Just a bunch of short San Juan worms. Maggots are what forms when you buddy's daughter leaves a dozen eggs an other trash in can inside lake house several weeks before we show up. I brought a Venus Fly Trap for weekend. It fed well!

Seems like the City of Scott City needs Snake I'd lessons, they posted a dead water snake, not copperhead. City of Scott City warns snakes are out. That being said, trip to the Ozarks today brought them out today too. Green snakes across the road in several places between Enough access road and Boss. Montauk was crawling with ring neck snakes. No mushrooms and small trout. Beeutaful day.

Insurance costs money. And insurance companies are in it to make money. I am sure the risk guys see what is going on and rates will rise costing the farmers more money. Either way, farmers are at a loss. Tax payer dollars spent on flood control and its not happening.

They say bumble bees make honey out of the pollen they collect. They have underground hives that are not as complex only containing several hundred bees max. They don't store as much food as usually only the queen winters. Honeybees have many hundred of thousand bees and winter above ground in great numbers. They rely on the stored honey to survive the winter as a group and keep brood raising all winter.

It may be the color of your box. They see red as black. And black irritates them. I made the mistake of wearing some black latex gloves one time. They swarmed them like mad. What colors do bees see I use plastic in my coated with wax. They will draw it in the spring and when they are building on a young queen. You can always melt some beeswax and brush some more on to get them to work it. Your queens may be getting older, most keepers requeen every 2 years or so. I would make some splits this spring and they will make a new queen if you do a walk away split. I usually take a frame of eggs and brood, a frame of capped brood, and a frame of honey out of a good hive and move it away. Fliers will return to original hive, nurse bees will stay to tend the brood. Feed them well and check them in 3 weeks. If you have new brood, they have made a queen and all is well. If not, add another frame of brood and eggs and give them another 3 weeks. Or buy a queen and put her in the split when you make them. They will release her and the cycle will start much faster.

Doing research, the Arkansas Black seemed to be the most resistant to disease and keeps in storage best. Can't say that I have ever saw one in a store. University of MO Ext site has some good info on fruit trees.

Spring has sprung, and bee season is here. Not much to do to them from November till March. Started last season with three hives at the farm. I bought 2 hives for the house to start the season at 5 hives. I split the hives early at the farm and brought 3 back. They prospered thru the summer and around July, I made 2 splits at the house to make a total of 10 hives going into the winter. Christmas day was abnormally warm this year and the bees were flying. One of the late splits were not flying. Opened them up and all were dead, quick frozen in time. They had the brood on one side of the hive and the honey on the other. A cold spell made them cluster on the brood and they starved out. Instinct will keep them on the young to keep them warm, they all died together. I broke that hive down today and cleaned it out. Entrance reducers came off today. Bees were pretty pissy, it clouded up here this afternoon and they don't like that. They know that weather is coming in and they are going to have to sit inside until it passed. But no stings, just bumps and buzzes. Put together some frames and went thru my backup boxes. Did an inventory on equipment to see what I may have to order and make this spring. Right now, I am ahead and ready for spring buildup when the flowers start blooming. Right now, all they have is maples to feed on. But danderlions will be popping soon with a few more warm sunny days. I am going in with 9 good hives. The 3 farm hives will get split up this season. They have been there for 3 years or more now without a new queen and have old comb. I will probably tear them all down and make several starter hives out of them, forcing them to make new queens. Going to be a fun year.

Ended up with 2 Arkansas Black Apples, a Granny Smith Apple, and a Bartlett Pear. Worked with the bees all afternoon getting ready for spring.

Local grocery store has fruit trees for 19.99 each. Good looking 4-5' trees. I plan on taking a few apple and pears out to the farm tomorrow and building my retirement orchard. Doing a little research on what they have an whether they self pollinate. May have to buy doubles.

I would say several thousand in repairs!

Finally cleared off a raised bed this afternoon after work and dug the strawberry plants out of it. The plants I had in the cells of the cement blocks last year put runners into the bed. They produced a 5 gallon bucket of young plants with great roots. Going to have to start another strawberry bed. Tilled the soil and planted lettuce, spinach, and snow peas. Covered back up with plastic. Plants I had started a month ago in the peat pots have lone since withered and died. I never have much luck with starting indoors months ahead of planting time. They do work good to sprout stuff in to start out before planting. Mushrooms around the corner, just a few weeks off.

Its all the hot air they blow that is causing the global warming. Nothing organic has ever came out of any of it. Nature has a way of taking care of itself.

How did your lawn look after that one??

I keep my boat on solid gravel, seems to work pretty good. Might have to dig it out of a creek. That Creek gravel works wonders.

Ya all missed the major point of this post. Imagine what kind of smallmouth fishery the White River System would be now if the dams had never took place. The Invasive Trout are nice, but, just imagine what that river would have been like over 100 years ago before the dams. Thats a beautiful smallmouth, nicely colored. Unlike the dark ones that I am getting used to in TN.