What Equipment do I Need to Keep Bees?

...r than too small. Gloves I’ve gone through a lot of gloves over time. I’ve used both rubber gloves and goat skin gloves. The rubber gloves come in handy where there’s the possibility of dripping honey such as when cutting bees out of a wall or doing a honey harvest. The goat skin gloves make for less finger fumbling. I suggest owning both. Smoker Dadant’s basic smoker has not changed design in a hundred years. It’s one of those objects, like the s...

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What the Internet Will Look Like After the Zombie Apocalypse

...net (though you could route the internet over it). Such a network could be used in an emergency such as an earthquake or weather event to send digital messages. It’s also the means by which I could continue to send out cute cat photos even if things go full-on Cormac McCarthy You could use this same hack, not exactly legally, to solve networking problems in a large house, business or rural property. And the same method has been used to set up data...

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How to Keep Skunks Out of the Yard

...d skunk hunting expeditions which never ended well for him. For years I’ve used bird netting to keep them out of my vegetable beds. The problem with bird netting is that it’s a pain to work with–it catches on things, tangles up, and occasionally traps a bird. I hate the stuff. It took me 16 years to realize that I could exclude skunks from the entire backyard. All it takes is a simple strategy: know thy enemy. Our new back gate. Hopefully the skun...

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I Spent 11 Months Building an Uncomfortable Couch

...tenon joints. We also had to figure out how to do the curved top rail. We used quartersawn white oak, the same wood that Stickley used for most of his furniture. Manny at Custom Designs Upholstery in Pasadena did the cushion. I’m very pleased with the end result and thankful to have a wood shop. The divan has decadent 1900 vibes, kind of the perfect couch to faint on after too many rounds of absinthe consumed while your significant other plays th...

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Maintaining a Worm Bin

...ss than an hour. You could go through a plastic tote-type bin much faster. Making a New Working Side After harvest you’ll have empty space–and that space will become the new working side, which means you need fresh bedding for the worms. I usually start by robbing some of that from the other side of the bin. Anything that’s big enough to notice, like a corn husk or a coffee filter or a handful of straw, I’ll grab. Today, I scraped the top layer of...

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