Prepping Traps

It was a rainy day last Saturday so I decided to pull out the rainy day chore list. At the top of the list was dyeing and waxing my coyote traps.

The first step in dyeing the trap is pressure wash or boil them to get the protective grease coating off.  Once that's done, you leave them out for a week or two to develop a coat of rust.

From 2014-03-26

I'd previously boiled these traps a while back, plus they'd been buried most of last winter, which hopefully took all the smell off of them.  They've also been hanging for a long time and developed an nice coat of rust.

From 2014-03-26

Here's my boiling pot.  Once it starts boiling, I'll add the dye.

From 2014-03-26

Testing to see if the trap would fit in the boiling pot.  It ended up not being deep enough, so I had to switch out to a 5 gallon pail I had laying around.

From 2014-03-26

While I was waiting for the pot to boil, I took a drive past the old abandoned car in the woods.  It's a cool old car.  I'd imagine a good restorer would love to get his hands on it.

From 2014-03-26

Unfortunately I got busy and forgot to take a final picture of the trap. I'll take one next time I go down.

Adding a new beehive

Wrestling season is over so I finally got a chance to go down to the prop and work on some long overdue chores, such as burning downed trees, starting the equipment, inspecting the beehive, visting Sadie, etc. 

Although you wouldn't know it from the weather, spring is here. At least that's what the daffodils think.

From 2014-03-21

If you ever doubt a coyote's sense of smell, this a hole they dug to get at a goat I'd buried back in November. They sniffed it out and keep digging a hole right into guts despite me reburying it over and over.

From 2014-03-21

It's kind of hard to see in this pic, but if you look in the foreground you can see my pincher hook that I finally got to use to drag uprooted stumps to my burying pit.

I'd bought it a while back to pull stumps out of the ground, but it was just too hard on my quad.  You really need a tractor to do something like that.  Now I just use the bulldozer to push out the stumps.  However, if it's a long way from my stump pit, it's a pain to push the stump all the way to my stump pit.

My new solution works well though.  I just hook the pincher to uprooted stump, then pull it to the pit with the quad, then when I get 4 or 5 stacked up I just push them in the pit with the bulldozer.  So far it's been working great.

From 2014-03-21

Here's another stump ready to be dragged down the road.

From 2014-03-21

We also followed through on my committement to add a beehive each year.  This time, instead of building the box myself and getting a bee pack through the mail, we decided to buy a ready made hive.  These hives cost about the same, but are already established so they start producing honey right away.

From 2014-03-21

Strapping up the hive at dusk.  Getting ready to transport to the prop.  Here's my friend Dusty who has gone all in and bought 14 hives.

From 2014-03-21

We made it safely to the prop and the bees are still safely strapped in.

From 2014-03-21

I don't think the bees liked the trip.  As soon as I opened the front door, they came boiling out.

From 2014-03-21

They generally don't come out at night, so seeing this many come out shows how mad they were.  Now that they're settled in, I need to go inspect the hive and see how things are looking.

From 2014-03-21