Hochsitz

Angie out for an early morning ride - cool but dry and sun doing it's best to warm things up. After picking up Flash went to the Hawangen dairy to get my weekly chunk of Chester cheese and then back to the village to pay my debts to the local garage. The owner has been away in Corfu for holiday looking really fit and he had a great time - he's a Corfu fan. As is usual in Bavaria, when he's away the garage closes but luckily we know each other well enough that I could simply take his car transport trailer recently when I needed it to collect the digger. Then on to farmer Franz to find out if he or son Markus could weld aluminium (no) and for a chat. He told me there is a big "moon event" coming up Sunday/Monday at some unearthly hour. Will have to set alarm and find myself a good position.

Spent the day on guttering, again. The other side of the garage, using the broken, rusty galvanised parts lying around. Got a passable job done by evening. Now need to tackle parts of the horse stables which I did in part some years ago myself but now need to change the water flow direction. I think it should in theory be simple but I fear it won't be!

Before sunset cleared up some of the bee equipment, trying to get together enough propolis material to have a go at making some tincture and possible some skin cream. It is legal to make your own and even give it away to friends (and enemies, I guess) but as soon as you start selling anything with propolis you are on tricky ground as the medicine and drugs laws kick in. You can sell it though to chemists for them to make products with it.

I haven't been keeping up my bee journal so for the record the last batch of honey produced 12kg (24 jars). Not a great honey year thanks to my not doing enough checks and letting the hives swarm. Have now fed up the seven hives ready for the winter and just need to do a varroa mite treatment soon using formic acid. If one thing has gone well this year it has been the very low level of varroa mites. The hard treatment I put them through last autumn paid off. When the cold weather really comes will relocate three of the hives in to the winter quarters. Now have seven hives (started the year with four) and hope all will survive as they did last winter although it is nowadays "normal" to lose 25-30% of hives due to still unknown reasons. One friend lost 90% last year. By pure coincidence my daughter Kate sent me a link this week to the Royal Mails recent issue of bee stamps.  Probably a hint from her daughter Charlotte impatiently waiting for Gramps summer 2015 honey supply. Will be in the post soon......

Talking of bees, Angie did the evening dog walk and came across the scene in todays Blip which she kindly gave me as I hadn't had the camera to hand today. It's not one of MrB's hunting "high seats" although she was close to his hunting patch.

Will have to ask MrB what on earth the hunter was trying to achieve. Perhaps he wants to have the best possible viwing seat for Sunday nights moon event?