I have my work cut out

oldenglish · July 01, 2009, 12:20:46 PM

A beekeeper put out a call for help, he has been so busy that he has not been able to get to 3 of his outyards to keep his bees in order. I agreed to help and last night we went to scope out the work.
Location 1, the blackberries have taken over and it was almost impossible to say how many hives were at this location, its going to take several hours of clearing just to claim back the land.
Location 2, Not so many blackberries but the grass is shoulder high and small alder are growing right up to the backs of the hive.
Location 3, no clearing here, the landowner keeps the grass well maintained.

I figure one evening at each of the first two locations just cutting and hacking at weeds, then a day between the three doing an assesment of what each hive needs, then several more evenings or a weekend adding hive bodies, supers etc

Hopefully hte weather will stay nice as this would be no fun at all if it were raining.

G3farms · July 01, 2009, 03:57:54 PM

sounds like fun at location 1 and 2. How many hives does he have at each location? could spend all day just clearing out the brush. Hopefully you can run a bush hog through most of it. Sounds like a good place for some 2-4D to kill all of the undergrowth.

Good luck with it and hope you get some good compensation out of it.

G3

oldenglish · July 01, 2009, 08:04:25 PM

Location 1 has maybe 10 hives and the other maybe 5, hard to tell as it was so overgrown. These are on organic farms to its machette and weedwacker time. I will post pics.

Hethen57 · July 01, 2009, 08:09:23 PM

An organic weedwacker is a goat....you can borrow one of mine if you need to...the problem is they do not discriminate between good plants and weeds very well... :roll:

G3farms · July 01, 2009, 08:31:50 PM

An organic weedwacker is a goat....

:lau: :lau: :lau:

now thats funny, never heard it put like that.

oldenglish I pity you for sure, have loads of fun. :-D

G3

Kathyp · July 01, 2009, 08:38:03 PM

you don't have access to a tractor and bush hog? there is nothing that is as fun as demolishing brush and small trees with that thing. makes the work go faster also!

beee farmer · July 01, 2009, 10:21:32 PM

Might want to lay down some rock salt after you get it cleared. All natural... and keep you from having to clear it again real soon.

JP · July 02, 2009, 12:05:01 AM

Hire you some teenagers to get the dirty work done. You won't regret it!

...JP

luvin honey · July 02, 2009, 01:24:05 AM

I'm growing organic, too, and bought a beautiful, beautiful tool today: A Red Devil. It's a torch that hooks up to an LP tank and burns the snot out of the weeds. It would not take care of blackberries, though. Maybe more for cleaning out the brushy, weedy stuff closer to the hives...