Musings of a Purple Dragon

I was about to leave last Saturday afternoon for (ironically) a beekeeping meeting with the Lancaster Beekeepers on Swarm Control when surprise surprise – the colony that swarmed last week swarmed again

This was from a colony that had only 2 Queen cells left – Obviously that was just enough for the bee’s – 1 to keep and 1 to swarm – However I still don’t think I would have broken them down to 1 cell as it might not have been viable

It landed in the next door but 1 neighbours garden on a garden arch with a grape vine growing over it – not the easiest place to extract a swarm from

Errmmm well I think I’ve learnt a massive lesson – Beekeeping in good weather is completely different from beekeeping when the weather is really ropey

I got my colony on the 27th April – told it was a small colony and would need feeding and it would be highly unlikely that I’d get any honey from them this year – I did feed them for a couple of weeks because it was when the weather was a bit crappy – I then moved them out of the poly hive they came in and put them in my equipment with a couple of extra brood frames and a super on top – checked them a week later and they’d hardly done anything with the super so I didn’t worry that I didn’t get chance to look in them for a couple of weeks

I promised a catch-up post – so I better do one – I’m hoping this will try and explain some of the things I’ve been going through over the last year – Inevitably it is going to be somewhat heavy going – there is alot of sadness and hopefully as Samhain approaches a form of catharsis in writing this post.

I’ve talked about my Mum’s health issues before back in April 2006 when she had to have an amputation on her left foot and how she had been a Kidney Dialysis patient for over 20 years.

After umming and ahhhing for a long time – I”ve decided to resurect my blog and start using it again unfortunately I allowed the old domain name to lapse and it now has a cyber-squatter sat on it so I had to register a new name – what better than my online name AmethystDragon – I use it almost everywhere anyway (apart from Facebook and a couple of forums).

Couldn’t let this pass without promoting it – As a meat-eater I feel very strongly that my family and I should only eat meat that has been raised in a decent way and I totally refuse to eat Broiler Chicken