My wife has been busy painting it for me. Ideally it should be painted in white, but I had plenty of light yellow paint (Dulux Weathershield X10) I purchased to paint my bee hives and I figure it’s pretty close to white.

If you're interested, the color is called "Cape Kidnappers" from the Dulux colours of New Zealand.

I obtained 100 metres of Underground rated CAT5E network cable. A lot of techie people have heard of Underground rated four core cable as it’s used by telephone companies to run the telephone cable through your front lawn to your house. The cable has a hard thick sheath to resist the elements and it’s filled with a sticky gel substance with the consistency of Vaseline.

Underground rated CAT5E network cable has a thick sheath and is filled with a waterproof Gel.

Unfortunately it ended up being 24 metres long, so I had a decent sized trench to dig… by hand.

Since it was going to be a big digging effort, it made sense to run two cables to future proof against more digging.

I decided to encase the ends of the wire (where they exit the ground) in some old pieces of garden hose as further protection, mainly against the goats.

The garden hose is extra protection against Goats

It turned out to be very hot work at two int he afternoon to dig, but ultimately only took me about two hours to complete.

Almost done. The Stevenson Screen will end up on top of the post

The open ends of the wires were covered with duct tape to keep them dry in preparation for wiring it all up.

Looking back towards the anemometer after the job is done.

I’ve now got most of the hard work out of the way. Who else do you know who has dual gigabit capacity running to the middle of their paddock?

I’ve built the stevenson screen, but it now needs a few coats of paint before It’s installed.

I have a very handy source of steel framing, so a 2.4m (8 foot) length of Galvanised steel Cee section was used.

I initially thought I would be able to cut a point on the piece of steel and drive it into the ground – We’d had lots of rain recently so I figured they would drive in easy. The theory was sound down to about 30cm (1 foot) where it just wouldn’t budge. I wanted to drive it to just below ground level so ended up having to dig a 2.5m (8 foot, 4 inches) deep hole with my hand auger and then compress the soil back around the steel.

The earth stake is 2.4m (8 foot) long

Once the earth stake was in place, it was a simple task of running a very thick piece of copper wire to the pole – Unfortunately I never took photos of this, but I took about ten lengths of think copper flex, stripped off the insulation and then effectively plaited them into a “Super Macrame Wire(TM)”. This was attached to the steel stake using a number of bolts and to the pole using a big washer attached to the bolts that hold the pole up.

My assistant just stood there and ate dirt

I purchased a La Crosse TX20 Anemometer back in July 2011, but it’s been sitting in a box waiting to be installed. I even spent the time to decode the Communications protocol so I could use the data from it in any way I wanted.

I had picked up a six metre length of Stainless steel tubing in mid 2011, so it was definitely time to put it up.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have a very good (detailed and verbose) document titled “Initial Guidance to obtain Representative Observations at Urban Sites” which I referred to (page 19)) to find the optimal location of the Anemometer. Nothing is perfect – The document advises mounting the anemometer at 10m elevation, but I thought 6m was plenty. I’ve also only managed to mount the anemometer at about three times the obstacle height from the nearest obstacle.

The pole is easily lowered by removing one bolt and using the other as a hinge.

The weather over the christmas break was terrible but I managed to find a patch of blue sky for this picture.

I installed the anemometer, but didn’t wire it up.

It's quite deceptive, but the tree in the background is about 40 metres from the pole

I still need to dig the trench for the cabling and ground the pole to protect against lightning strikes.

I did a very small (single frame) honey harvest on about the 17th December to get a couple of jars of honey for xmas gifts. I would have done more, but there was only one frame of fully capped honey – I gave it away and in no time at all had none for myself.

On the 30th December, I went out and managed to get two frames to harvest. Out of these two frames I got seven jars of honey – One of them disappeared before the photos below.

The honey is a very mild flavor, clear and runny. I’m pretty sure it’s clover and dandelion honey.

Here are some of the better results – Enjoy…

This hive is from the Nucleus I purchased

The hive from the Nucleus I purchased is another story – In the last few days the population has exploded and I’ve just put a super on it. This is the first super I’ve put on any of my hives and is the start of a Honey Era!

First Super. w00t!

As of yesterday, I’ve now collected a total of three swarms and turned down the offer of another four or five swarms, mainly due to lack of equipment to keep them in!

A swarm I collected from a rubbish bin in Pukekohe

I’ve also purchased one Nucleus which is doing very well and will probably end up being my main Honey providing hive for 2011.

The swarm I collected yesterday ended up actually being a number of separate swarms, all in the same tree. I’m not sure if each swarm had a queen, so I’ll just have to wait a week or two and see what happens.

We ended up with three of the six eggs hatching – they’re all Black Australorps. We’ll have to wait a couple of months before we can confidently tell which sex they are.

It looks pretty clear to us that the two Black Australorps are Males while the Blue Australorps are Female.

The Males are for sale or swap if anyone is interested.