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

Evaluating Old Bottles

One problem with a silver lining we have at the prop is all the garbage left behind over the decades. We've worked hard to haul trailer after trailer loads of garbage to the dump, but every now and then we find old bottles and cans that might actually be worth something. It was tough to figure what was good and what was bad, but this Food Bottle Diagnostic website has helped a lot. I'll try an post a few pics of interesting bottles and cans I've found.

Coyotes Coming to Visit

Coyotes have been digging up Chocolate Rain's decomposing body and have been pretty brazen about it to boot. Last weekend I was doing some bulldozer work and watched a coyote come close enough that I probably could have hit it with a rock. I stopped the bulldozer and ran to get my rifle but it was gone by the time I got it loaded. I figured that would be the end of it and put the gun back in the truck. Well that cheeky coyote came back not 30 minutes later and took his time trotting by. I've been wanting to start trapping again and this episode has gotten me motivated. I've found some good links on coyote trapping that I'm studying. This sounds like it has the makings of a productive and challenging new hobby.

Another Buddy for Sadie - Meet Chucky

After Sadie's last buddy mysteriously died a few weeks ago, we ended up getting a new buddy for Sadie.  Meet Chucky.  He seems like a really nice goat and we hope he fares better than the most recent ones.

From 2014-01-19

It's been super cold lately, which means icicles in the sink holes.  These are actually kind of small, but show how much water is constantly oozing out limestone.

From 2014-01-19

Big Red does an admirable job as a tractor, but a real tractor would sure be nice.  In the pic below, I'm getting ready to head off to create a new trail.  The meadow trail I've been contemplating for the last year is finally coming to fruition.

From 2014-01-19

Update on latest projects

Between football in high gear and other obligations for the last couple months ,  it's been tough to get time set aside to do my project work down at the prop.  It's probably a good thing though.  As Socrates said, moderation in all things.

The bee project continues on.  We're heading into fall, so with the reduced bee traffic, I thought it would be a good time to put the entrance reducer on, to prevent robber bees and/or mice from getting in.

From 2013-10-20

By making the entrance smaller, it gives the bees better odds of defending the hive against intruders.

From 2013-10-20

We were able to make a lot of honey this summer, in fact the top super is so heavy with honey I can barely lift it.

But with this being the first year, I thought I'd err on the side of leaving the honey in place.  I want to keep them alive through the winter and make sure they have enough food so I ended up not harvesting any.  There'll be plenty of time for that after the spring honey flow

From 2013-10-20

Fall is also time to move the animals from the summer pen to the winter pen.  It's also time to buy hay for the winter.  After having done this for going on three winters, I've come to find that I really like the 5x5 rolls alot better than the smaller sizes. They don't cost much more, but they seem to last a lot longer.

From 2013-10-20

The problem is that they weigh about 1000 pounds a piece.  It's tough to work with them without special equipment.  However, if you don't have a nice tractor, there are other ways, like chaining off to an old oak tree and pulling.  Thankfully it worked exactly as planned and I had big bale of hay sitting in the middle of the pen.

With just Sadie and Chocolate Rain eating this winter, it should last them a long time.

From 2013-10-20

I usually line the others up so they're easy to roll into the pen, but these were so heavy, I just let them lay where they lie.  Hopefully, I'll be able to get the hay spear rig I'm inventing ready by the time it's time to move the next one.

From 2013-10-20

Securing the winter pen is my other project.  I've been going around the pen, post by post, lowering the high spots, raising the low spots, and putting in extra posts wherever things are saggy.  I'm also putting an electric wire around it about 4 inches high, to deter dogs from digging under.  I figure if a dog is small enough to get under a 4 inch high wire without getting shocked, then it's not big enough to hurt a goat.

From 2013-10-20

I'm also going to set up some traps at spots the dogs went in last year.  I'm debating on whether to bait them or not.  On the one hand, I don't want to any predators drawn in if they're not already interested, so I might just leave them unbaited so I don't encourage them.

Sadie seems pretty happy about the new arrangement.  She has clean water, endless hay, and a nice shelter.  What more could a donkey want.

From 2013-10-20

My other project has been putting up a fence where the poachers like to come in.  It won't keep anyone out, but it will eliminate the excuse that they didn't know they weren't supposed to be there.

I used to be a lot more live-and-let-live about the whole trespassing thing, but then I started thinking, if I went on one of these guys' property, they'd be out there in a flash, with a shotgun in my face, so I figured I'd be at least as welcoming.

It was a lot of work to get in, but I think it turned out pretty good for doing it with very minimal help.

From 2013-10-20

My final project is starting to bear fruit (inside mushroom joke).  The first trial on growing commercial style mushrooms is working exactly as planned.  They're taking off and should be ready to eat in a few days.  More to come.....

From 2013-10-20

Bee update & Rebuilding the parking area

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.

From 2013-06-11

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.

From 2013-06-11

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.

From 2013-06-11

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.

From 2013-06-11

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.

From 2013-06-11

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.

From 2013-06-11