Michael McCarty

Good Friday swarm followup

The Swarm Trap

It’s been an exciting few weeks with bee activity.

The past few days we have been watching a few scout bees go in and out of the swarm trap in the front yard. We keep looking at night to see if anyone has moved in but were disappointed. This afternoon we were outside and heard a hum that is indescribable — loud but not angry. The sky was black with bees. I placed my Mac outside of the hive box and recorded the swarm moving in. As more and more bees were arriving the weight of the trap caused it to fall not once but twice until it finally rested on the ground.

We moved the swarm from the trap into a hive tonight. Only 4 stings amongst the three of us.

When we opened the trap to move the bees into a deep, we were amazed at how many bees were there. The trap was more than half full when we started moving them in there they easily filled the 10 frame deep box. We added a second deep to contain the overflow of bees and topped it off with a hive top feeder full of sugar water.

We did this at night and had some problems with the bees crawling on us and finding their way inside the bee veils (all the little holes are taped).

We still have a few things to learn about transferring swarms from the traps into hives. We’ll have to watch @Kirkobeeo do this one day.

Here’s the clip from the swarm’s arrival.

The swarm is growing accustomed to the hive today. We’re feeding them with a hive top feeder.

Today there is a lot of bee activity around where the swarm trap was yesterday. This is probably from the bees that didn’t arrive yesterday, but we’re not sure. We’ve put out the swarm trap again and they’re collecting inside it as well as sucking down the honey that’s been placed there.

Can swarms arrive over two days?

Tonight we’ll move the swarm trap to the hive and reunite them. We’re guessing that we’ll simply open the swarm trap and leave it on the hive. The trap has a couple thousand more in it and we’d rather not repeat last nights excitement.

Honey Harvest

The Swarm

Sometime on March 7th or 8th our original hive swarmed. We were able to recapture the swarm and set it up in a new hive. Bees swarm for a reason, usually it’s because they’re our of space. There wasn’t a camera around for photos of this so I have nothing to show. The bees swarmed to a branch about 50 ft away from the hive, about 20 ft up. We moved these bees successfully into a new hive and it looks like they’re staying.

The Inspection

Since our original hive swarmed we were expecting a hive that was full, had no brood and some queen cells. This is exactly what we found. We pulled 7 frames of honey out of this hive and added a honey super to the top. There are now 30 frames.

The Harvest

Sweet, sweet honey!
35 lbs of golden honey.

The truth about the Bees

For the record…

One theme that persisted throughout my photography are my photographs of bees. I’ve always liked seeing bees on the flowers and photographed them every time I had a camera in hand.

This year Sandy set me up with beekeeping gear for my birthday. I’m hooked. I admit it, I like playing with and observing the bees.

We now have hives in two locations, are registered with the county as beekeepers and members of the California State Beekeepers Association and looking for ways to provide for more bees.

There will be honey soon, the sweetest kind.

Aperture 3 and iDefrag

Recently Apple released a welcome major update to Aperture. This added a lot of new features and with that there came a file format change. Moving to this new format required a lot of processing to convert my library containing about 40,000 referenced images to the new format. This left my Aperture Library file a fragmented mess.

Coriolis Systems has a defragmentation product called iDefrag. It works well and will burn itself onto a bootable CD/DVD and which will allow your to really optimize the layout on the hard disk.

iDefrag allows for the definition of classes files which allow you defrag a specific sets of files. The classes file is defined in the documentation and given in a rough BNF grammar. They don’t provide any examples other than their builtin definitions called Default.classes and builtin.classes found within the application bundle: /Applications/iDefrag.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj. A Google search doesn’t return much of anything in the line of a howto to help create new ones.

To keep my Aperture library from fragmenting to badly I’ve created an Aperture.classes file which defines a set of files that files that Aperture 3 uses. This file lives within ~/Library/Application Support/iDefrag. There can be multiple Aperture Library file sets and even the default can be different for everyone so simply I stayed with just using the filenames found within Aperture.

class "Aperture" {
    match files where name = "AP.Minis"
    match files where name = "AP.Thumbnails"
    match files where name = "AP.Tinies"
    match files where name = "AP.FaceTiles"
    match files where name = "BigBlogs.apdb"
    match files where name = "Faces.db"
    match files where name = "Library.apdb"
    match files where name = "Historp.apdb"
    match files where name = "Properties.apdb"

    color "Crayons:Cantaloupe"
}

From within iDefrag I can now select this Aperture class set and which Algorithm to use and let iDefrag do it’s thing.

I hope this is helpful and keeps your Aperture library defragmented and nice and speedy.

The bees are happy

Taken by Michael McCarty http://www.flickr.com/photos/88415891@N00/4396317507

Conejo Valley Parks

I thought I’d try my hand at running a Flickr! group: Conejo Valley Parks. I took a few panorama’s of three of the Agoura Hills Parks this weekend and added them to the group.

Morrison Park

Forest Cove Park

Old Agoura Park

Green Boots

Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)

Last week I read about this book and as the father of three very creative boys I decided I’d give it a try. A lot of the things we’ve already done and others look like the boys will learn another thing or two.

Last night it hailed for about 5 minutes. In Southern California this is a rare event and we went out and played in the pea sized hail. I believe this was the only activity in the book where we needed mother natures cooperation and I had already written that off as something we’d never get to. Now it’s the first thing we took care of.

Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)

Paso Robles Panorama

I spent a few days in Paso Robles this winter, great weather and a lot of fun. We took an off-road jeep tour and were able to cut through a few vineyards. Here’s a panorama taken from the Adelaida Cellars vineyard. Click on the image to see the full sized one.