Photo Blog

How Sweet It Is

Conventional wisdom says that when a new honeybee colony is established, the steward should not expect them to make enough honey to harvest in their first year. There are good reasons for this. First, the bees need honeycomb to store and process nectar. The bees need to actually make this honeycomb before they can use … Continue reading How Sweet It Is

Thermals

I got out my thermal camera today to see how the beehives were doing in the infrared domain. These are composite pictures from the thermal imager, which combines the IR and visible images. The imager is relatively low-res by modern standards, with 320×200 pixels. That’s plenty to do inspections looking for hot/cold spots, but doesn’t … Continue reading Thermals

Apiary!

After all that mud, wiring, and other prep, it was time to go get the bees this weekend. And so it was. The bee farm promised to close up the nucleus hives for safe transport but offered, for a small additional charge, a mesh bag to go over the hives for added security. I opted … Continue reading Apiary!

The altE Store: My Worst Tech Support Experience Ever

About 4 years ago, I bought a bunch of solar power related equipment from The altE Store. This equipment included everything I needed for two complete and independent systems: photovoltaic (“solar”) panels, racking systems, junction and breaker boxes, charge controllers, AC inverters, roughly 1000 pounds of LFP batteries (two different kinds – more on that … Continue reading The altE Store: My Worst Tech Support Experience Ever