Battery dies quickly, next stop scrappy ?

[Tony1951]

Same here all old batteries have cells dismantled for torch use or other smaller 12v packs .
My pair of dolphin batteries and an old Sam 22f pack (all 36v) still hold good voltage but sag with heavier current draw so are used as DC supplies for my beekeeping electric centrafuge extracator which only demands 4a max.
Some 8/9 years later my 36v Sam 26f packs still provide sterling service, now reconfigured to two 12v 3s 6p packs they provide power for a diy beevac using a fermenting bin and my vapouriser pans to administer treatments via vaping organics acids .

To much stuff is thrown away when it still has plenty of life left .

Re your bee keeping uses for old batteries: I tried beekeeping in my urban garden about 35 years ago. I bought a hive off a mate in Buckinghamshire who had over four hundred hives. All went well until I was looking for queen cells one hot humid day and the bees got mad and stung my neighbour. This meant I had to move them to keep the peace. I put the three super hive in a closed trailer and moved it to a rural location, but I had to make a rather sharp stop on the way and the hive fell over. When I opened the trailer up the scene that greeted me was horrific. The hive was all over the place and about forty thousand bees were in there, all loose and mad as hell. I had to get inside and scoop them up in hand fulls and try to get them back inside.......

I had forty eight stings in my head face and neck. I felt pretty bad and sat the whole weekend shivering up against a radiator. I never went back to the hive.... Honey is not worth that much grief when you can buy it for a couple of quid a jar.

Completely agree with your point about too much stuff being dumped rather than re-purposed.

 

[saneagle]

Re your bee keeping uses for old batteries: I tried beekeeping in my urban garden about 35 years ago. I bought a hive off a mate in Buckinghamshire who had over four hundred hives. All went well until I was looking for queen cells one hot humid day and the bees got mad and stung my neighbour. This meant I had to move them to keep the peace. I put the three super hive in a closed trailer and moved it to a rural location, but I had to make a rather sharp stop on the way and the hive fell over. When I opened the trailer up the scene that greeted me was horrific. The hive was all over the place and about forty thousand bees were in there, all loose and mad as hell. I had to get inside and scoop them up in hand fulls and try to get them back inside.......

I had forty eight stings in my head face and neck. I felt pretty bad and sat the whole weekend shivering up against a radiator. I never went back to the hive.... Honey is not worth that much grief when you can buy it for a couple of quid a jar.

Completely agree with your point about too much stuff being dumped rather than re-purposed.

Bees are OK. A few years ago, I found one struggling on the footpath near my house, so I took it home on a bit of paper. I was growing strawberries in my greenhouse that were just blossoming. I put the near lifeless bumblebee on one. I could see its proboscis come out and start licking part of the flower. After a few minutes the bee became a bit more animated, like it was getting better. I used a stick to lift it onto another flower, and it immediately started licking again, and it got enough energy to jump to the next flower on its own. I don't know whether it was the warmth or the nectar, but after about 30 minutes, the bee was flying, so I helped it out the door and it flew away. I was very pleased with myself for helping it get its life back.

A few days later, I was out on my motorbike and stupidly ran out of petrol because I forgot that I siphoned it into my other one. I was about 10 miles from home, so too far to push. I was sitting there with the fuel cap off weighing up my options, when a bumblebee landed on the petrol tank, I assumed attracted by the bright yellow paint. It did a bit of a dance and flew away. About 10 minutes later, a massive swarm of bees came swarming all round the tank. I was really scared that I would get stung, but I was fully covered by my motorbike gear and I dropped my visor to stop them from getting my face. I shouted out something like what the **** is going on, then one bee shouted back BP.

The first part of the story is actually true - twice.

 

[Tony1951]

Bees are OK. A few years ago, I found one struggling on the footpath near my house, so I took it home on a bit of paper. I was growing strawberries in my greenhouse that were just blossoming. I put the near lifeless bumblebee on one. I could see its proboscis come out and start licking part of the flower. After a few minutes the bee became a bit more animated, like it was getting better. I used a stick to lift it onto another flower, and it immediately started licking again, and it got enough energy to jump to the next flower on its own. I don't know whether it was the warmth or the nectar, but after about 30 minutes, the bee was flying, so I helped it out the door and it flew away. I was very pleased with myself for helping it get its life back.

A few days later, I was out on my motorbike and stupidly ran out of petrol because I forgot that I siphoned it into my other one. I was about 10 miles from home, so too far to push. I was sitting there with the fuel cap off weighing up my options, when a bumblebee landed on the petrol tank, I assumed attracted by the bright yellow paint. It did a bit of a dance and flew away. About 10 minutes later, a massive swarm of bees came swarming all round the tank. I was really scared that I would get stung, but I was fully covered by my motorbike gear and I dropped my visor to stop them from getting my face. I shouted out something like what the **** is going on, then one bee shouted back BP.

The first part of the story is actually true - twice.

Ha ha - love it. You had me there for a minute with the last bit.

Yeah I do that as well (rescue bees) and I've even done it to wasps. If you are at home, you can just get a tiny smidge of honey, jam or even sugar and add a drop of water and the bee/wasp/ant or whatever sugar eating critter, will lap it up and be transformed into a tanked up power house in a very short time. I once kept a wasp that I'd found half dead late in the year. I put it in jar in the kitchen, with water, a sugar source and it survived into the spring. I opened the jar one evening and the stupid bugger flew up into the light shade where a hundred watt incandescent bulb fried it and the thing dropped out of the shade dead.... What a waste of time and sympathy that was.

Just like us, the bees use sugar as their main source of energy. Sugar made by plants from water air and sunlight. There isn't a great chemical difference between the starch that we eat as carbs (rice, wheat, potatoes) and the sugar they eat.

Sugar formula - C6H12O6
Starch formula - C6H10O5

Two fewer hydrogen atoms and one fewer oxygen. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen bound up together... Yummmy!!

 

[Nealh]

I think a lot people take up beekeeping for the wrong reasons, alot being about ecology and saving the bee nonsense common and typical with urban beekeepers.
Beekeeping isn't for alot of people because they can't read the bees or what is actually occurring within the hive.
Need this damn weather to settle now been chilly , windy , wet & stormy for most of the year so far. Some how my garden colony I don't think will pull in the 116kg's of honey it gave me last year and don't think my the others will be providing much of a crop at the rate the weather is going.
As the saying goes no two years are the same and for those who are in it to try and make a small fortune , they need to start with a large fortune to begin with.

 

[Tony1951]

I suppose it is an agricultural business really nealh, and none of those make people rich except when done at very large scale. I used to keep hens and had about 16 layers. I kept them because I had retired and wanted something to do that was a bit 'agricultural'. I got my eggs cheaper than the decent shop kind, but ot that much cheaper and it was quite tying for obvious reasons. But I became aware that it would need to be done on a vast scale if any money was to be made out of it.

I have small farmer friends who work every hour there is, keeping sheep and maybe two hundred layers, but they will be lucky to make minimum wage, and like you, they are at the mercy of the weather, which can turn a good year into a rotten one in a few days. I am put in mind of helping out with lambing one April at a thousand feet above sea level. They were lambing outside and bringing in the weak or the problem cases. There wasn't cover for the majority of them. We lost sixteen lambs in one night when there was a drop in temperature and strong winds with wet sleet. Sixteen lambs that might have made £80 a head a few months later.

EDIT: By the way 116kg of honey from one hive is a pretty massive crop. I would have thought 40or 50kg was more the norm for a decent hive. You surely won't get that every year.

 

[Nealh]

Crop kg is dependant on many factors , weather, forage nearby and the most contributing factor the beekeeper. One needs to manage and read the bees well, prevent swarming (and the loss of all those valuable foragers), increase the hive /brood laying size to make use of the extra 1000's of foragers when needed during the critical nectar flows.
National average according to the inept BBKA is a mere 18kg.

Yes the 116kg was quite excepional everything last spring was perfect from very early on, typically 36kg to 67kg are my usual ranges form my colonies.