I'm an Honorary Uncle again!

Found a King Snake today. Non poisonous, so it kept it's head.

I have the camera set up again.

http://www.donnerpartykitchenstaff.com/

I tried to shake the cluster out over my head. It was too low in the tree for me to do that. My co-beek Alfredo almost took off his veil in the middle of it.

This is what it's like moving bees during the day, except that normally you don't take off your veil. The bees were trying to rob the honey under the netting. Saturnino took the video with his cell phone.

I killed a rattler in one of our apiaries today

Left home in Wednesday's pre-dawn hours, got home about 2230 Saturday. We worked from dawn to dusk to deliver, evaluate, switch & feed 3000 colonies.

This is the last 8 colonies to be worked before we head home.

Sorry about the lack of postings here. I got turned on to Facebook, and have been spending most of my computer time there.

I'm speechless...

sorry about the picture quality, it was dark & I used a camera phone

We had our Christmas dinner tonight at Mi Guadalajara in Escondido. It's a nice restaurant with great food. Had a great time talking and joking around. We actually had conversations that didn't involve bees (gasp!) It was nice to meet everybody's families. Being such a small company, 6 people, we get to know each other well.

Alfredo and Jose & his wife are on the left. Saturnino (aka Tony) is all the way at the end in the dark shirt. Hermelindo & his wife are somewhere down the table past Dave's wife. Dave (da Boss) & his wife Marcia are sitting on my right.

This is how we make the pollen substitute to feed the bees. On the left you can see the finished pallets loaded with the mixture. The round cylinders are 55 Lb (25 Kg) containers of pollen. To the right of them are the pallets of soy flour & brewers yeast. Hermilindo is filling 5 gallon buckets with sugar syrup from the tank on the truck. The scale in the middle is what I use to measure out the dry ingredients. Tony is dumping 40 Lbs of pollen into the mixer.


This is about a 3 Lb patty in the hive.

Also, you can eat this stuff. All the ingredients are food grade.

I post a lot of funny stuff, work related pics, family pics & anything else I find interesting here.

This isn't one of those posts.

Several months ago my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Out of 13 samples taken during the biopsy, only one showed any cancer. They felt that they had caught it very early. His Dr. advised him that even if they did nothing, he would probably die of something else. One of the things dad & I share is that if we do something, we are thorough, we make sure it is done right.

Yesterday my dad's prostate was completely removed with DaVinci Robotic surgery. The 5 hour operation took 11 hours. The operation itself went smoothly, but as they were counting the tools used during surgery, they came up missing one biopsy needle used during the procedure. After many, many X-rays, the Dr's were confident that the errant needle was not inside my dad.

Pops had us worried there for a little bit, but he's fine now. Please keep him in your prayers for a smooth recovery.