Well, I had an exciting and productive weekend. I changed the oil in my car all by myself for the first time (well, Gary was in his garage working on his truck just in case I had any questions, but I did everything myself). I feel pretty clever about it, even more clever than about the headlight bulb I changed about a month ago. I don't have any pictures since my hands were all yucky during the process, but the whole thing was really cool. I learned some cool things about it all (a few of these things I already knew partially, but sort of knowing, and actually doing are different things entirely):
- My pretty little car takes 5 U.S. quarts of oil when you also change the oil filter, which I did. I put in five quarts of a super-duper, synthetic, heavy-duty oil for diesel engines by Amzoil (15W-40). My car must find it pretty yummy, because she purrs along nicely.
- The used oil is very black when it comes out, blacker than I remembered. It was about the color and consistency of the ink I grind from my ink sticks when I attempt to do some Chinese calligraphy or brush painting, although the consistency of the oil depends on the temperature, of course.
- It is an excellent idea to let your engine cool enough so that it is the above consistency. That way, you don't burn yourself on the hot oil, but it still flows out pretty quickly.
- A 19mm drain plug is difficult to loosen while you are lying on your back under a car.
- I discovered that my arm is thin enough to thread an old oil filter through all the hoses in the engine compartment to place it in the full oil pan beneath the car without making a mess.
- You dab some fresh new oil on the gasket of the new filter before you put it on.
- The rocks in Gary's driveway are somewhat sharp.
It was all very cool. And I feel pretty clever about it.
After I had finished with my oil change, Gary asked if I wanted to help him with his bees. So, he and I spent the rest of the day pulling frames of lovely honey-filled comb from his hives and extracting it. I took lots of cool pictures of the process, but unfortunately, they are all on Gary's camera, which is in Rhode Island with him right now!! So, I will have to wait to talk about that until I can get my photographs. Instead, I'll post some other pictures of his honey bees and talk about them.
Gary has three hives of honeybees that happily live in his back yard and forage for nectar throughout the area. There are several different species of honeybees that are kept by beekeepers. Gary has two species: Italians (Apis mellifera ligustica, these are also the species of bees that my parents had in New Hampshire) and Carniolans (Apis mellifera carnica). They all make lots of honey that they store in the honeycomb in the hives. Gary pulls the frames, extracts the honey, gives some to me to cook with, and makes mead with most of the rest of the honey. His mead is quite good, by the way.
The photograph above is from early this spring, when it was still pretty chilly. Bees don't like the cold, so they stay nice and snug in the hives on cold days. The deeper boxes at the bottoms of the hives are the brood boxes where the queen bee lays her eggs and the workers tend them. The upper, narrower boxes are the honey supers. The frames for those are smaller because when they are full of honey, they are very heavy. Gary forgot and put a brood box on top (the dark green one), and it weighed about 100 pounds when he pulled it off this weekend. That is a lot to lift smoothly when there are lots of annoyed bees buzzing around you...
The bees forage on their own and pretty much take care of themselves, but in the early spring it is often a good idea to make up a sugar solution for them to start on. During the cold winter months, their numbers decline somewhat, and if you feed them early in the spring, they build their numbers up much more quickly, so they have more foraging bees to send out once the nectar starts really flowing in the late spring. So, at the end of March, when Gary was packing up all of his stuff to move to San Diego, my mother and I cooked up a batch of sugar syrup for his bees and loaded into the big five-gallon bee-feeder he designed. It is pretty simple to do. You just dissolve lots of sugar in the water and cook it until it is a fairly runny syrup. In the photograph, you can see my Mom syphoning the syrup into the five-gallon bottle that makes up part of Gary's feeder.
Traditionally, home beekeepers use inverted Mason jars with holes poked in the lids so the sugar syrup drips out, but the bees suck those dry very quickly, so the poor beekeeper has to fill them daily. 
Gary got annoyed with that and designed a five-gallon feeder so he did not have to fill it so often. Even with so much, the bees empty it pretty quickly. Here's a photograph of Gary with his feeder just after he finishing hanging it up.
Here is a photograph Gary took of the bees on the feeder last summer. You can see them clustered on the lower bottle. He had dyed the sugar solution blue at the time, which is why the lower bottle is that brilliant blue color. The lower bottle has lots of pinholes in it, so the bees lap up the sugar syrup through the holes. If you look inside of the window to the porch, you can see a pile of new frames he was building for the hives!
Here is a picture of Gary with his bees not long after he got them and put them into their new hives last year. Honeybees are pretty gentle; it this photograph, they are clearly more interested in working on their honeycomb than anything else.
I will close with the coolest picture of them all. Gary took a picture of the bees flying around the bee-feeder one afternoon last summer. In the photograph, you can see the differences in the coloring of the different types of bees (and you can see a couple of yellow jackets that also were attracted to the sugar). The shutter speed of the camera was fast enough to freeze the motion of their little wings! It is a lovely photograph. Once I get the other photographs from Gary, I'll post those ones too and talk about how we extracted the honey from the honeycomb, which is an adventure in itself. :)
Vince just came over to my office and helped me to inventory and pack up all of the Jlab Graduate Student Association sports equipment and picnic supplies that had been left over from the last picnic that we held two weeks ago. This stuff has been all over my office floor since then. I should have taken a picture of all the stuff while it was strewn all over my floor...it was a real mess. However, I really wanted to take an inventory and get everything packed up nicely before putting it all back into storage. The equipment had not been used in a long time before we organized this June picnic, so I had to spend a great deal of time tracking down where it had all been hidden away and forgotten about. I even had to send another of the officers, Peter, out to buy some Frisbees and a soccer ball since I could not find the GSA ones. I do not want to go through all of that again! 
