Notes From Zone 4

I’ve wondered for much of my life why I have to be so careful to correctly tie a square knot rather than a granny when it seems that others get them right effortlessly. I have the same trouble with some other kinds of knots ,too. Sometime over the weekend, I had a rush of brains to the head in the context of doing something else that felt backward. Yup, I’m left handed, and that’s the way my hands want to move.

For a test, I tied a knot right handed. I had to pay attention to make sure I did it right handedly, but the square knot just worked. There’s no big deal here, but it does provide the first real world (rather than cultural) advantage to being right handed that I’ve ever noticed.

We’re running the new Mega-Catch bug catchers without CO2 and it looks like we need to change that. They are catching black flies, but nowhere enough, and no mosquitoes at all. After we bought them, I saw someone else point out that the favorability of a review of the Mega Catch inversely correlated to the latitude of the reviewer. Basically, five stars in Florida, half a star in Alaska. This guy figured it was because of the lack of CO2. OTOH, the Mosquito magnets do use CO2, except that the propane burner used to make it is the part that fails. So we’ll hunt up an industrial gas supplier and see if that helps.

I went out to check the bee’s syrup this morning, and beat a retreat after checking a single hive. I don’t think I’ve ever had to suit up just to check the feeders before, but it’s apparently necessary now. Interesting, no clue what it means