I’m going off topic long enough to say I just survived the worst day of my blogging life. It was just a 24-hour period spanning two days, but it felt like a week. It all started when I was doing some general website maintenance. Suddenly my theme disappeared. It was just gone. Then, when I tried to figure out what went wrong, a string of error messages appeared—page after page scrolled out like a rolling spool of toilet tissue.
This ominous-looking text which kept repeating the word “fatal” showed up if anyone clicked on my site or if I tried to log into it. Talk about frustrating! All I could think of was the amount of time I have put into this site, which is nothing short of ridiculous.
I will spare you the gory details, but I want to publicly thank two people. Phillip, my friend and fellow beekeeper in Newfoundland (There are bees in Newfoundland?) provided a steady supply of moral support in the form of e-mails. He said I would be up by the end of the day. I didn’t believe a word of it, but it was nice to hear. Phillip also provided some technical insight via his brother the techie. A special thanks to both these kind people. You can visit Phillip at Mud Songs.org.
I also contacted Wordpress.org, Bluehost.com, and BytesForAll.com, the source of my theme. I had been conversing through the forum at BytesForAll with the moderator, known as juggledad. Nothing was working when he suddenly asked for my phone number. I sent it to him, never expecting a call.
But he did call, and in no time he had my site purring like a kitten. In addition, he spent an unbelievable amount of time with me showing me how to customize the theme, giving me pointers on back-ups, plug-ins, and password organization. He instilled in me a degree of software confidence I never had before. All of his help is going to make my site even better and so a very special thanks goes out to juggledad at BytesForAll. I could not have done it without him.
As Phillip wrote to me yesterday, “There are good people in surprising places.” I found a lot of these yesterday, and every single entity I contacted responded with advice. No one ignored me and I am grateful to every single one.
So, with all that said it’s time to get back to the honey bees. While I wasn’t paying attention yesterday, the sun came out and so did hordes of restless, weather-bound bees. More on that in my next post.
Rusty
Hi Rusty,
Glad you are back. We talked about follower boards on full frames. Just wanted to know if the bees would draw comb on them? And what is best wood or plastic frames? I plan on using plastic on the deep supers.
Thanks for the info.
Manuel
Just as bees don’t build comb on the walls of the hive, they won’t build comb on the follower boards. Now you may see some once in a while–a little burr comb here or there–but not a complete comb. If you see some, just scrape it off with your hive tool. It shouldn’t be a big issue.
I have a queen mating box divided into four two-frame sections. Each section is separated by masonite and I’ve never had comb built on that either. It’s just not the kind of configuration they like. They want their combs to hang down–not be stuck on a wall.
Personally, I prefer wooden frames but either type will work fine. My main reason for preferring wood is I can burn it when gets old, whereas I have to take plastic to the dump. Some people say bees don’t like to draw comb on plastic frames, but in my experience they’ve done just fine. Most plastic frames are sprayed with beeswax to make them more attractive.
Beekeepers have their preferences, but bees are pretty easy to please. Try both kinds if you get a chance and then you can decide which you like best, which is what I did.