Those creatures above are a killer/honey bee mix. I met them yesterday while cutting down a palm tree with my chainsaw. I was concentrating on the cut I was making when I started noticing a buzzing sound much louder than the chainsaw.  I thought to myself, “What the heck is that?” I looked up and the air around me was solid with bees. It only took a fraction of a second for my brain to tell my feet to get moving. I did one of those cartoon moves – my feet running while I was spinning around in mid air. After I got some distance between us I noticed that I hadn’t been stung. The bees were still back where I left them. They were swarming and normally swarming bees won’t sting you. I’d worked with a beekeeper many years ago and he taught me a lot about bees. I just wasn’t sure about the killer-mix bees. I knocked the bees out of the palm tree so technically they were not swarming. Maybe they were just as disoriented as I was. Anyway, after a few minutes they settled down in a palm branch and I went back to clearing the palm branches away.

Somewhere in the middle of that bunch of bees is the queen. The bees surround her to protect her and keep her cool by directing the heat away from her with their wings. Later, I turned the sprinkler on near them to get them to move to a better location. I wouldn’t want curious Moochie to run into them.   

The picture on the right is the new home of our xm radio. It’s made up of an old fan and part of an old clock. Our xm’s new home has a built-in amplifier, volume switch and power converter. It also has external speakers from a surround sound system that quit working. We now have a wonderful sounding music experience.  It’s not bad to look at either. Kind of reminds me of one of those old tv’s they had in the 50’s. 

We also got into a little Winky repair. One of our female dogs is in heat and Winky suffered her wrath when she got tired of explaining that no means no. She gave him a few puncture wounds and opened a one inch long gash above his eye. It was open right down to the bone. The fight happened on Sunday and the vet, who is 2 hours a way, wouldn’t be open until 10 on Monday morning. Winky needed stitches. If we waited until Monday morning the edges of the wound would have already started to heal and the vet wouldn’t have been able to stitch him up.  We thought about stitching him up ourselves but the wound was very close to his eye. I finally had an inspiration. We cleaned the wound, pushed the edges together and smeared some glue called Goop on the cut. It dries in seconds and held the wound shut.

Today we used a small electric trimmer to cut the hair under the edges of the glue and finally got the wad of glue to come off. The cut was clean and pretty much healed. We smeared on some antibiotic cream and turned him loose. Winky isn’t scratching or bothering with his eye so it looks like we performed another successful field surgery. Around here we think quick and make use of whatever materials we have at hand.