I think all the work we've been doing making clearings and trails has started to pay off as we're seeing more and more deer and turkey. I scared this hen out right next to my sons tent when he was camping out. She got pretty flustered by all the humans hanging out around her meadow.
The bee project is also coming along quite well. The bees seem happy and healthy and are multiplying like crazy. I was glad we were able to catch a bit of the spring bloom season before things started tailing off. Hopefully they were able to put away a little honey.
I've been hesitant to do too much monkeying around with the hive. I'm worried about doing damage and at this point don't see much need to take things apart other than curiosity and that hasn't been enough of a motivator yet.
However, I'm going to have to do some re-architecture to the hive and replace my two shallow supers as the hive body with one deep super. It's going to interesting to swap these out and should add greatly to my experience level. I hope the bees survive my learning curve.
The plan at this point is to put the deep super on top and let the bees start building some comb. Once they build it out, I'll put it on the bottom and put the two shallow supers on top. This will better allow me to manage honey collection next season. A shallow super weighs about 50 pounds and is tough to manage in a full bee suit, so I'm thinking a deep, weighing around 100 pounds, would be a literal pain to handle.
Things are early enough on in development that I don't think it will be too traumatic for the hive. I might take the opportunity to move the hive as well, and try to put down some beetle protection under it.
Our other project has been to make the trailer area look more attractive. We'd originally used it for camping and equipment storage and although it was very functional, it wasn't very pretty.
To make it nicer looking, I bulldozed up some of the gravel and made gentle arcs on both sides, and then used the old cabin's chimney rocks as a retaining wall. It's still looking pretty raw but I think it'll be real nice once the grass starts growing back and I put a finishing layer over the gravel.
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