That Reminds Me

The spring has been a favourable one for the bees, and after an inspection a week ago, things were looking very promising. Sarah, after the merge had really filled out, so I added supers, which were just starting to be drawn out this week. However, she also had a wet queen cell, which was earlier than I expected! Having inspected Tess and found her not very far behind, I decided to take advantage of the situation, and try to bring on some nucs.

I took 2 nuc boxes, taking 5 frames from each colony (3 brood, 1 eggs, 1 stores), shook in as many bees as I could, and placed these on new sites. The flying bees will return to the original colony, but the nurse bees will stay behind, raise the brood, and hopefully also queen cells.

There was only one complication - I couldn’t find the queen in Tess. Despite writing down that she was unmarked, I somehow forgot this fact, and discovered today that with a very busy colony with a lot of running bees I just couldn’t find her.

I went ahead with the split anyway, and will check back in a few days time. Either the original hive or the colony will have queen cells in it - meaning the queen is in the other box. I can then spend time finding and marking her.

Hopefully this increase in numbers will allow us to pass on bees to new beginners from the EMBA course which will be running very soon.

One of the key requirements of Pacemaker is that there must be good communication between the nodes at all times. This is so that the cluster is always aware of what is going on, and can ensure that resources are properly managed. A break in communication can mean that nodes might each ‘go off and do their own thing’, at best a massive headache for a sysadmin, and at worst total data loss and system corruption. When nodes in a cluster begin to operate independently from one another, the situation is known as a split-brain, and each node or collection of nodes in this situation is known as a sub-cluster.

You can do your best to mitigate this by ensuring you have 2 independent routes of communication (and independent here means ideally physically separate wires, switches etc). However, whatever methods you use to ensure connectivity, there will always be one fateful day when for some reason communication with one or more nodes is lost, or corruption on a node causes it to start behaving erratically. At this point you need to have previously set up fencing.

Just a couple of examples of how English (though, I suspect lots of languages have this feature) can make repeated use of the same word while still remaining correct (though often not understandable.

The commonest one is the repeated use of ‘Buffalo’ or ‘Badger’ - though both of these require some stretching of the language (and are contrived sentences to make this point).

My favourite ones though, which could in theory be dropped into any sentence, are ‘and’ and ‘had’.

and

John notices that a sign on a fish and chip shop has no spaces between any of the words, i.e. ‘FishandChips’. He turns to his mate and says: There should be a space between Fish and and and and and Chips.

This one is of course easy to understand, especially when punctuated: space between Fish and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and Chips. (‘and’ in quotes being the and on the sign).

had

Jack and Jill are learning English and the use of the word had. Jack, where Jill had had had had had had had had had had had the approval of the teacher..

Ok, so this one is a lot harder to understand (and drop into a day-to-day sentence!), but again can be understood by adding extra words and replacing a few hads here and there: Jack, where Jill had written ‘had’, had written ‘had had’; ‘had had’ received the approval of the teacher. So, again quoting the written hads: ‘Jack, where Jill had had ‘had’, had had ‘had had’; ‘had had’ had had the approval of the teacher.

Lovely!

Spring is definitely here, with hot weather, sunny days and a lot of plants in flower.

The bees have been coming on leaps and bounds in the last few weeks, and most of the brood has hatched since the last inspection, leading to very full colonies!

Tess is packed - bees covering 10 frames, though not all of these are in use. I’ve added 2 supers to try to spread them out a bit and give them some space to store the flows that are probably on the way (sycamore and hawthorn).

Sarah was also quite full - 7 frames of bees, with 1-2 frames undrawn on each end, but filling out nicely after last week’s feed.

Rebecca still had no sign of a queen, and the eggs I had transplanted in had been capped over, but not made into a queen cells. As a result, I decided to merge Rebecca on top of Sarah using the newspaper method. Hopefully the bees will give extra strength to this colony at this early stage.

Due to various complications, I hadn’t been able to get up to the apiary to begin the spring feeding until today. Since the weather was also good I decided to have my first post-winter inspection.

All 3 hives had bees in, though with different strengths:

Tess is still strong, with eggs and brood across multiple frames, and a reasonable amount of stores, though they were tucking into the sugar bags. I left some 1:1 syrup - 2kg of sugar to 2 litres of water.

Sarah was a bit weaker, but still happy enough, with brood, though some unused outer frames. I didn’t have the right feed equipment with me, so they’ll get fed on Monday, weather permitting.

Rebecca however appeared queenless - no sign of eggs or brood with a moderately strong colony of calm black bees, tightly bundled, and tons of stores left - an ideal candidate for breeding! There’s a slim chance there’s still a queen in there, but to check this I put in a half-frame of eggs from Tess. I’ll check back next week - if they’re building queen cells then I’ll probably knock them down and merge with Sarah to make a stronger hive. If not, then I’ll just have to wait for this elusive queen to start laying.

Pacemaker has a resource agent designed to allow you to monitor network connectivity, and allocate other resources based on the connectivity score.

There are 3 resource agents which do the same thing:

ocf:heartbeat:pingd (Deprecated)
ocf:pacemaker:pingd
ocf:pacemaker:ping

The main difference between the last two is that ping uses the system ping tool, allowing it to run on non-Linux systems. In general it is advisable to use the ping RA. In either case the name of the attribute defaults to pingd.

After getting repeatedly annoyed with the fact that the mouse pointer in vncviewer on virtual machines never properly follows the local mouse pointer, and is always offset, I spent far too long trying to find a solution. The answer is actually quite easy:

libvirt guest XML:

  
<devices>
<input type='tablet' bus='usb'/>
...
</devices>

Command-line:

  
qemu -usbdevice tablet  

I was struggling to find a way to pass 1 or more arguments to a latex newcommand, without running into problems. In this case I was trying to build an index where the section title could be placed into one or more categories.

\newcommand allows you to specify a number of arguments, but this number is mandatory, and if you specify a higher number than you actually supply, then it will start to ‘eat’ into the next part of the document:

  
\newcommand{\entry}[3]{#1 #2 #3}  
  
%In the document:  
\entry{a}{b}  
This is a test.  

Results in:

  
a b T  
his a test.  

If you supply less arguments than the number specified, you will receive an error.

My solution was to use one of the internal variables to generate a for loop, iterating over a comma-separated list of categories.

  
\makeatletter  
\newcommand{\entry}[2]{  
\@for \xx:=#2 \do{  
\index{\xx!{#1}}  
}  
}  
\makeatother  
  
%In the document:  
\entry{Title}{cat1,cat2,cat3}  

This results in and index of:

  
cat1,  
Title  
cat2,  
Title  
cat3,  
Title  

The tricky bit is that

\@

is a command in its own right. We need to use the

\makeatletter

and

\makeatother

to prevent the code being read as

\@

followed by

for

.

Finally, the results from my Beltane community survey are in! And they make interesting reading! Hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

The oxalic acid eventually turned up after the traditional seasonal chaos of the Royal Mail, so it was time to go and treat the bees.

I decided to put on ‘emergency’ sugar bags again this year (see the previous post for the instructions) just in case we have a long winter or a poor start to spring.

On inspection, all the hives at the apiary had bees, and all seemed fit and healthy, with good sized clusters!

Of my hives, Rebecca seemed the strongest - a black-looking colony in a tight bundle, active, but calm, with no flying when we took the lid off. Next was Tess, which was in good condition, quite yellow bees, and a lot more activity and flying when disturbed. Finally came Sarah, which seemed quieter and very ‘spread out’, though still with a good number of bees. There’s a chance this means Sarah has lost her queen, but its also just as likely that they were spread out as they were hungry, as this hive had the fewest stores in it, and they responded most actively to the oxalic acid/sugar solution.

Hopefully there’ll still be 3 hives come the start of spring, in which case there will be room for either expansion or passing on of colonies to beekeepers who have had less luck than us over the last couple of years.