Some Bees doing well - One colony perished

For late October I found me Apiary very busy yesterday with plentiful amounts of pollen being carried in. Ivy forage is plentiful and very beneficial just now. and is in close proximity. To a varying degree the top inside each hive was heavy with condensation. I raised those slightly to give better ventilation but today will be checking again to gauge if its working. The lost colony had been struggling through the summer and I had hoped I might feed them through the autumn but perhaps I left it too late. Now the job of cleaning up and disinfecting everything remains. The bars are to be scorched and washed in hot soda solution. Likewise the hive itself will be thoroughly cleaned out and disinfected.

Come December I intend to treat all three surviving hives with oxalic acid vapor against the veroa mite, the same treatment as done the previous December. 

A wartime Baby

My arrival was not the best time to be borne. During the second world war when my dear mother worked in a munitions factory nursing the injured machinists prone to having small fragments of metal shed into their eyes. The diet at the time was meagre and for me included dried banana and powdered egg. To buy any food at all required the ration book to be shown and I believe there was something like four ounces of butter or margarine allowed per week. My father was working away from home surveying. Bonding with his first son never took place. My first and second brothers arrived at three-yearly intervals with a fourth brother arriving when I was twelve.
In the early years, my mother made soft toys to supplement the family income but soon after war ended their first home was bought close to the seaside. After a couple of years, it was sold in favour of a larger house on the seafront but the cat ran away and I was ill with tonsilitis.
Another move took us a mile or so back from the sea, but it was another victorian terrace and not well heated. I remember several winters sharing a bedroom with my two brothers and that room faced north. Frost would often form on the inside of the sash window.
Those were not the happiest years of my life, with parents often squabbling for reasons I could not fully understand. I was maltreated by this unpredictable father and felt some resentment even towards my mother for tolerating his behaviour.

My early education was unsatisfactory as well, due to the fact that I was sheltered from mixing with much of the rough and tumble to be found in the community. My father believed he was a cut or two above the rest, so I was put into a tiny little private school of seventeen boys, under the one proprietor/schoolmaster, who had his favourites and had put his retirement on hold. The rest of us boys were less well encouraged to learn anything at all. I learnt to make pea shooters and cotton-reel tanks.
Consequently, I failed my 11+ and reached secondary school, but the woodwork master and music masters both saw that I had potential and I was entered for the 13+ to grammar school to be further educated.

By that time the family had moved a few miles down the coast and I had built my first canoe as well as many a balsa wood model aircraft and a model boat or two. Tools were hard to come by and I remember frequently cutting fingers on the makeshift razor blade tools I could find.
I taught myself a rudimentary kind of ballistics, having access to spent cartridge cases and black powder or propellant gleaned from fireworks.  My father made his own cartridges for his punt gunning sport. Today I would probably be locked up for my exploits.
At this time cars were fewer on the roads and children would happily run off to explore the countryside or seashore without any worries.
At seventeen I obtained my driving licence at the first attempt and within a couple more years acquired my first MG two seater. It was a barn find at £45 and driven back from Pipers Pool in Cornwall.
That sports car was later sold to be replaced by a better MG open sports model which absorbed all of my savings.
To a greater or lesser extent, I suppose I am today re-living those years, albeit with a lessened vigour, but undiminished in terms of enjoyment. My mother always said enjoy yourself while you are young - they are the best years - I found her pessimism to be unwarranted.

Discovering myself

A time of life for quiet reflection.
Working backwards along that timeline is a long story I have to tell, and it would be silly to bore you, dear reader, with the mundane struggle we all endure at some time.
Look through my blog posts,  and it should not be difficult to discover much of what I do so I will dig out some nuggets from the inner me.
Gone are the days of vain pretence and the coy retreat into the quieter self. There is confidence in feeling I am one of the elders.
I don't circulate much and neglect the cultivation of new friends and fail to nurture the friends I already have. Within that circle, I count myself fortunate enough to have two younger brothers.
I enjoy the music of the 20s - particularly this band Tuba Skinny.

America's music and the best  to come from there in a long time. 

I always doubted the presence of a divine spirit and despise the hypocrisy of the church, where the cloak of respectability provides cover for a multitude of child abusers.
I believe only a parent may be trusted with the care of the child and yet even they sometimes are found wanting. The exception to that rule will sadly always hold true.
The unsung heroes of this world are generally the mothers - only they hold in their hearts the gift of boundless love for the child.

Regards the mysteries beyond our planet; so much is being discovered today that there is a veritable flood of information, theories and speculative ideas from the science of space physics. All of us have access to the library of the internet and news media. Findings we can all enjoy by placing our own spin on where we are at, and how we imagine ourselves lost and found, floating round and round on a spinning globe.
I think of the cosmos as being in a state of confused regularity.  I mean the alternating destruction and regeneration of matter into its constituent parts and back again to its condensation into the elements already familiar to us.
As for the expansion of the cosmos from the so-called big bang. (In my view a fallacy). I suggest the cosmos has always been present in one form or other.
Some things are unbelievable because we lack the imagination to speculate on that which might be very real. The puzzle has a solution, and the solution is doubtless standing there in front of our eyes
Current findings suggest the universe is expanding, but different methods suggest the rate of expansion is different, according to which method of measurement is used. With eighty per cent of the matter believed to be dark matter of unknown form or whereabouts, it is of little wonder that a measure of uncertainty has crept into the calculation. Most of what we know is brought to us in the form of light and radiation. Slow light appears red, fast light appears blue.
May I postulate the notion of a universe that is swimming in a form of dark matter that is the same dark matter that coalesces to form a black hole, but dispersed throughout the cosmos in the form of a solidified gas. infinitely tiny, each unit might remain at its original density but be so small as to be undetectable except in its ability to regulate the speed of light through it. That might explain why light travels at a uniform speed.
Sound travels through the air at a speed dependant on the temperature and density of that air; or through water at a greater speed, due to the greater density of water compared to that of air.
My further postulation is, therefore, that light may seem to be travelling at a uniform speed throughout our localised galaxy but may be moving through the wider universe at a slower speed due to the more rarified density of the dark matter gasses through which that light travels. The apparent recession of the outer cosmos, away from us, could be due to that difference in the speed of light. Giving the false impression of a cosmos that is expanding and receding away from us at its outer reaches.

And that last word "reaches" is the wrong one to use because the inference is of an outer limit or extent. An all too easy mistake to make, when my notion is of an infinite cosmos with no outer limit.
Why? - Because mathematics is the language determining all that happens out there and we have all heard of the term infinity.
It's here that my imagination runs away with itself. My understanding of it is very sparce but I like it for the width of its ability to describe the simple and the complex. Here's the funny thing - it's a language that's out there to be discovered, and we only know the half of it. Conjectures abound that are yet to be proven and lots more that are untested and beyond our imagination. 

September honey Harvest

I know it is late in the season to be taking honey from the hive but I
have been slow to harvest much at all any earlier. Due to wet and windy weather and projects elsewhere, the opportunities simply were not there.
A hindrance to harvesting this year was a degree of cross combing that needed sorting out, with most of the honey stores being spread out amongst the horizontal log shape of the colonies. Harvesting was tricky to do without blundering down into the brood nest.
My attempts at queen breeding have been postponed till next year.
However, my inspection yesterday went well. Smoker lit and fuelled with oak havings which I light up with the help of a few capfuls of methylated spirits. Despite this and being wrapped up well under my smock and veil, I was stung lightly through my sock and again on the lower right leg from a bee that ventured up my trousers!
Three of the colonies are doing quite well with no depletion in numbers as yet.
The fourth colony have not recovered in number after being shaken down from an old hive into my own Cathedral top-bar hive. The idea is to enable interchangeable bars and easier manipulation.
I shall feed from now on, till Christmas or they may not overwinter.

I prefer to use the honey without extracting from the comb and managed to gather 10lbs in all.

Wear out a Morgan gracefully

Preferring not to allow the Morgan to gather dust in the garage. Weather permitting, it's driven with enthusiasm at every opportunity, and with the hood down.

From acquisition day with less than 7,000 miles on the clock in 2011, it is now approaching 70,000 miles, but with little or no change to good performance or cosmetic good looks.

The bodywork and underlying mechanics are sound and the M.O.T. regularly passed with hardly a comment. The majority of maintenance is done by myself and I have only once suffered a breakdown when the radiator failed. The common weakness here was rectified later by fitting an all aluminium radiator.  All the fluids are regularly monitored and changed.

Particularly impressive is the way the ECU keeps the engine in tune. Starting is instantaneous and the engine has always run perfectly. This includes several trips abroad using all kinds of terrain and types of road. To get a flavour of these ventures, see elsewhere on this Blog.
As well as the radiator change I have renewed the rear brake shoes, replaced disk pads, replaced sliding pillars with hard chromed ones, sheathed the pillars in leather to keep out dirt/grit. Replaced a master cylinder, added spotlights, added triple horns, replaced washer fluid tube, added a clock and voltmeter, renewed the auxiliary ribbed belt (very simple to do), adjusted tracking, tied down all loose wiring, renewed perished parts of the cooling tubing. adjusted the handbrake cable, greased the spider universal joints to the transmission and steering. Oiled the leaf springs and hangers from time to time. Bled the brake system several times. Made a dashboard of wood and more recently a wood steering wheel and matching gear knob. Kept a log of all work carried out, together with mileage and dates on which this was done.

I have a decent hydraulic jack and axle stands for getting safely underneath.

In the garage, I normally drape a softcover dust sheet over the top.

A planned trip to Cadiz had to be postponed this year  (2019) because of a minor medical issue and lack of free time through childminding duties. However, there have been some lovely ventures and newly discovered venues closer to home in the south-west UK, including Newton Ferrers and Noss Mayo.