Swarm Hive Split

On Tuesday, 5/21, Nice day in the middle of rainy cool period. Sunny and mid 70s for a high.

We have a plan to split all 3 of the drives that have survived, starting with swarm hive.

SPLIT (first split):

Starting about 1230 we began going through swarm hive looking for queen, supercedure cells, and swarm cells. The hive was packed with bees. No outward signs of swarming, however, over last week. Mix of frames with a lot of capped brood. Only a few super frames with larvae. Seemed to be a variety of larvae sizes. Did not see any cells with eggs, but they are hard
to spot, and there were bees all over the frames. Hard to see. No supercedure or swarm cells. Seemed like a lot of drones, but still they are only about 5% or less of population, and there were lots and
lots of bees. Could not find the queen.

Created a split hive containing the following: Took 6 deep frames, with bees,  containing mixture of honey, pollen, and capped brood. Added a couple of
honey deeps (no bees) to the hive box. To that, added one super box and took one super frame that seemed to have the most larvae uncapped, of various sizes, and 8 super frames with and without honey.

Took this split hive out to new farm location and set it up.

Split hive:

------------
top cover
inner cover
super (S)      <--- one frame with larvae and bees
hive body (H)  <--- bees and capped brood
bottom board
------------

Swarm hive:

------------
top cover
inner cover
super          <--- bees and misc frames
hive body      <--- queen should be in one of
hive body      <---   these boxes ?
bottom board
------------

Since we are in some doubt about eggs in the frame we moved to Split hive, considering buying a queen for this new hive. Also considering queening the
other two split hives.

Thursday, Chris went to Columbus and picked up 3 fertilized queens. These will go in the split hives.

Price Prehistory Museum

Entry to the Price, UT, museum of Prehistory

I believe this is some kind of Utah Raptor.

Cleaners

Heights Cleaners, Albuquerque, NM. Next to Ruben's Grill, good Mexican food.

First cut at abstracting an image. Cropped, posterized, and edited out a white car on right of building.

Petroglyphs

Scratched in lava rock near Albuquerque, NM. (Some possible later vandalism.)

Near Shiprock

Manipulated this image a bit.

Well That Explains a Lot

When i was in my 20's, i did a little art, painting, on my days off. My jobs were technical, mostly programming, and they required between a fair effort to near complete mental obsession. I learned early on that between quitting time in the technical job to being able to paint required at least 48 hours of down time. I.e., until two days had passed, i was creatively blocked. It was a fact, but why?

Having just finished The Age of Insight, by Eric R. Kandel, i now have something of an answer. In the chapters 'Brain Circuits for Creativity', and 'Talent Creativity and Brain Development', research does conclude that the left and right sides of the brain usually have basically different functions: left side more concerned with logic, deriving solutions from a limited set of options; right side open to a much wider range of problem solutions.  Both sides contribute to problem solving where "inhibitory and excitatory mechanisms interact in complex harmony." Importantly, the left side appears to inhibit the right side to some degree (possibly vice versa).

It is noted that injury to the left brain can result in enhanced function of the right brain, sometimes an increase in creativity in the arts. "After an injury [...] one side of the brain may result in the enhancement of specific functions on the other side of the brain." (p478).

The pressures of programming, project deadlines, predictable outcomes, rely on solving problems by putting together combinations of previously exercised patterns. Only occasionally do you need really creative solutions. This suggests pretty strongly to me that, since work demanded dominance of the left side strengths, it exercised inhibitory control a lot of the time. The 'complex harmony' took about 48 hours to reassert some creativity into mental life.

(Thanks, Chris, for coming up with this book. The author is a bit wordy, but it's a readable book that attempts to link art and neuroscience in meaningful ways.)

A Work in Progress