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Everything is back under control in the hive

The unfortunate effect that I had in the hive by trying to fix things and enforce straight comb drawing had me pretty pessimistic about the chances of my bees this winter. Everything was completely disorganized with brood and honey in random places, way too many drones and barely any honey.

The lesson I learned is that the hive is self healing and surprisingly so. Today’s  inspection was an amazing discovery of their capacity to adjust. They reorganized all the frames, gathered some very good honey reserves late in the season and have a very healthy population.

And the best part is that the approach of enforcing straight comb drawing with plastic foundation every other frame worked! It’s still not an ideal scenario to have plastic in my “natural” top bar hive but it definitely takes care of the problem and I still get half of the frames 100% built by the bees.

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FreeBSD 9.0: higher MTU & NIC bonding

Here’s is some information that took me a good while to gather.

With the igb driver in FreeBSD, the mbuf cluster size needed is a mathematical formula involving the number of CPUs & the desired MTU. Unfortunately, it is currently hard set. On enterprise machines with many cores and higher MTUs, it is quite easy to reach this set limit. It will express itself with the following error message after an ifconfig:

igb0: Could not setup receive structures

This limit can be overridden with the following in /etc/sysctl.conf

[code]kern.ipc.nmbclusters=131072
kern.ipc.nmbjumbo9=38400[/code]

These are the value that worked for 16 cores & an MTU of 9000.

While we’re at it, it took me a while to nail the exact syntax require for NIC bonding so here it is:

/etc/rc.conf

[code]if_lagg_load=”YES”
ifconfig_igb0=”mtu 9000 UP”
ifconfig_igb1=”mtu 9000 UP”
cloned_interfaces=”lagg0″
ifconfig_lagg0=”laggproto failover laggport igb0 laggport igb1 192.168.0.123 netmask 255.255.255.0″[/code]

As far as I can tell, capitalization matters…

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Chicken Coop!

It’s been over a year since our move away from the city and we’re finally getting back into chickens. Things take time, starting fresh at the other end of the country doesn’t happen overnight. We only got 5 layers  as we’re pretty late in the season, we’ll start meat birds next spring.

The coop still needs some polish and a window but here it is in all its current glory:

With a bunch of Rhode-Island Reds

Works for toddlers as well

As with the beehive, I drafted everything on Google Sketchup and it made building it completely devoid of surprises. The plan can be downloaded here.