An Eventful Weekend

Well, I went down to the land to try to get some farming done and some other things, the weather didn't cooperate very well so the farming part still isn't completed but such is life.

Here's the pickup and trailer loaded for the weekend:

I had the tractor, 7' box blade, the spreader, 600lbs of sorghum, 300lbs of peas, 600lbs of corn, 300lbs of protein pellets plus all the stuff I would normally take down there for the weekend!

Here is the tractor called into service a few hours later. This is my biggest hog to date (the bucket on the loader is 5 feet wide), and the 5th so far this year. Based on trail camera pictures I think I am actually putting a dent in them or they are staying away from the my land for some unknown reason!

Here is a close up of it's tusks.


Another task this weekend was going to be getting rid of a huge bee hive that is about 50 feet from the travel trailer.

Here is a picture of the stack of lumber the hive was in. I'm going to try to use some of this wood to build a blind this summer.

I originally had a guy that keeps bees as a hobby that was going to come and get the bees from me this spring so I didn't bother killing them this winter when it would have been easier in the low temeratures. He backed out on me at the last minute and I tried to find someone else that would want them but no one was willing to come and get them so I decided I would have to kill them.

The guy that backed out on me said that if I tarped the hive and put some dry ice in there with them that it would suffocate them but not hurt the honey so I bought 10lbs of dry to try it.

Here is the hive tarped up. I even used duct tape on the seams to make sure I had a good seal.


Well, long story short, it was a complete failure, all it did was make the bees mad. You could hear them buzzing under the tarp from about 25 feet away!

Well, since I already had the thing tarped up, and you can buy honey at the store, I figured I would buy some bug bombs and set them off under the tarp and see if that would work. I bought 6 of the bug bombs that are good for an entire room and set 2 off that night, set 2 off the next morning and then checked on them a few hours later. There were still bees in there buzzing!! It was pretty cold out (under 50) so I waited a while for them to settle down and then pulled the tarp back and then started a bug bomb spraying directly into a crack where I had seen the bees going in and out of the hive. After a few seconds of that the bees came out pretty quick. I put the tarp back over the hive and set the last bug bomb off and then started hitting the hive with a big rock to get them riled up while the spray was going.

An hour or so later I went and checked again and there were still bees buzzing but even when I hit the stack of wood with a rock none were flying out. I pulled the wood off the stack and decided to go for broke. I flipped the lumber over that the actual hive was in and here is what I saw.


The lumber with the hive on it in the left of that picture was on top and is 2' wide and 8' long. If you look close you can see that the honeycomb was actually nearly the entire length of the lumber but that is what they live off of in the winter so it was eaten down to the last 2 feet or so. The way the lumber was stacked it was perfect for the hive.

Here's another picture:


There were still hundreds of bees still alive in the honeycomb! It was cold enough that it was everything they could muster just to fly away and all of the protector bees were already dead so I just watched from a couple feet away while they flew off. Hopefully they might start another colony somewhere nearby that isn't quite so close to the trailer and not inside the lumber that I want to try to use.

I didn't get everything planted before it rained and it was too wet after so I will have to go back down there to finish sometime in the next week or two. I broadcast spread some other seeds and didn't get a chance to use my disc to cover them back up so hopefully those will do okay with as is.

Well, I think that is about it. I thought it was pretty eventful!

Nathan