Preparing for Uncertainty and Self Reliance

[Speaker to Animals]

How not to do it. LOL

[Montegriffo]

How not to do it. LOL

He should have used a scythe. That's all they use at the farm I live on.
As quick as any power tool if you are proficient and virtually silent. The bees don't even know he's there when he clears around the hives.
No shitty 2 stroke fumes and shredded nylon going into your soil either.
Apart from sharpening the blade and occasionally oiling the wooden handle, they are maintenance free.
They can last generations if you look after them. I bet Farmer Paul's scythe is 50 years old.

[Speaker to Animals]

How not to do it. LOL

He should have used a scythe. That's all they use at the farm I live on.
As quick as any power tool if you are proficient and virtually silent. The bees don't even know he's there when he clears around the hives.
No shitty 2 stroke fumes and shredded nylon going into your soil either.
Apart from sharpening the blade and occasionally oiling the wooden handle, they are maintenance free.
They can last generations if you look after them. I bet Farmer Paul's scythe is 50 years old.

You can also go out there before dawn, close the hives, do the work, and then come back in a little while to open the hives.

A better solution is to put landscaping cloth down under the hives so that nothing grows around that area. Helps keep beetles out too.

I suspect too that bees get a tad upset when you shoot giant wads of cut grass into their hives like ballistic fuck yous.

[Speaker to Animals]

These dudes are at a different level.



Although I would be more interested in trying to use those sheets to wrap around a kayak frame you build from branches.

[Speaker to Animals]

To get an idea of what I mean, this guy shows how to make the kayak frame with branches, but he creates the skin with commercial plastic wrap.



If you can take those bark skins, remove the outer bark, wrap them around the frame from the bottom up, then you can stitch them with that cordage they made along the top spine of the kayak. If the wraps are overlapping, and if you use some kind of resin (like tree sap? I dunno), then you might have something that would get you from point a to point b along a river or some other waterway in an emergency using only a knife.

That has to be how people used to do it in the past.

That would be a cool ass experiment over a weekend.

[Speaker to Animals]

Ah shit..



Does remote casa de la fife have cedar and birch? He wouldn't miss a few of those..

[Fife]

I've got some really good old growth cedar. I love cedar. I'll shoot someone for messing with my cedar.

Birch, meh. The local stuff's like johnsongrass down in the bottom. The good yellow birch is all up on the plateau and in the mountains AFAIK.

[Speaker to Animals]

Would you even notice one cedar missing?

[Fife]

I'm pretty sure I would scent her distress signal almost immediately.

I've got some fallen cedar I could sell at a reasonable price. Cedar's actually great to work with after it's been on the ground a few years. Maybe a gallon of mead per linear foot or something like that.

[Fife]

BTW are there any Africanized honey bees to speak of up in the mountains now, or are they still all down in the coastal swamps?