A Journey of Many Pounds Starts With a Single Penny

LadyGnome

Thank you very much

LadyGnome

In true MSE fashion now that I have hit a bit goal, I've started looking for my next one 

I've decided to focus on some big bills I know I have coming up plus chunks of the mortgage.  So here are my first two goals

Mortgage Goal 1 - Into the £140k bracket - this should only take a couple of months given where I am

Bills Goal 1 - £900 bill due Oct 2022 - currently have £259.53 set aside so £640.47

These are, on the face of it, small goals, given the way I've been hitting the mortgage but these bills are playing on my mind, in that, I know they are coming up and I don't feel like I am fully on top of them.  I don't want to pull money out of other savings pots to meet bills that I know now I am going to have to pay.

powerspowers

Well done on reaching halfway and for setting some new goals

Suffolk_lass

I've got someone starting today who is going to paint the outside of the house and I keep dreaming about whether the RS will have matured before his bill needs paying! what are we like!?

themadvix

Fabulous progress Lady Gnome and very sensible to set some smaller goals - they are very satisfying I find.

@Suffolk_lass 😂

savingholmes

Just read your diary. Good luck with the next 50%

peb

Just caught up since February.  I take it you were sadly unsuccessful in the Lord's ballot? (I'm only managing one day at Headingley this year, I usually manage the whole match)

LadyGnome

Hi peb - I was successful in the ballot partly due to it being the Jubilee weekend.  It was a fantastic day as always.  Slightly spendy as it was so hot I had to buy a Lords cap to avoid ending up the same colour as the ball.  It is part of my longer term winding down from work plan that I watch more cricket and I would love to follow a full test match.  I think I will join Middlesex CCC in the next couple of years so I can sit in the pavilion at Lords (albeit for county matches).

peb

How brilliant.  Headingley is comparatively inexpensive but I didn't have enough leave to do a working day.  It's not worth membership whilst working though 

LadyGnome

We extracted honey from the most productive hive this week.  I now have a bucket and 1/4 of honey sitting in my kitchen waiting to be jarred on the weekend. 

One hive is being problematic as the queen in there was poorly mated.  I was seeing a lot of drones and some evidence of sac brood (a disease that stops the bee larvae developing properly).  We have a small nuc with a queen it it so I killed the queen from the dodgy hive left them a few days then introduced the nuc.  I have he main hive bees in a box on the bottom separated by newspaper from the new bees from the nuc.  The bees eat their way through the paper over a few days which allows the scents to mingle so they are less likely to battle to the death.  The only problem is I couldn't see the queen from the nuc when I put them in.  I have marked her but she is flighty so there is a chance she absconded when I tried to put them in.  I am going to leave it a week and see what happens.  I may have to give them a frame of brood from another hive to see if they try to raise a queen or not.  I also cleared out a lot of the old comb and drone brood and gave them fresh to work on.  If there was some disease then I want to give them a clean start.  The old comb is in the freezer - I will uncap the brood and put it out for the birds who really appreciate bee larvae.  

The two swarm hives seem to be doing OK.  One of them has multiple eggs in some of the cells which can be a laying worker but the eggs are at the bottom so it can just mean an over enthusiastic new queen.  Workers are too small to lay at the bottom of cells so a laying worker usually deposits eggs on the sides of the cells nearer the entrance.  I am going to see how the cells are capped - if they are worker brood them its fine.  A laying worker can only lay unfertilised eggs so they will all be male.  I haven't seen the queen in either swarm hive but the other one has larvae in it so something is laying in there.

I am off work for a few days in between contracts and I see honey jarring and beeswax rendering in my future.  I am debating what to do with beeswax.  I am going to make some wraps / cling film alternatives and I think I might start candle making.  I have about 600/700g fully cleaned and plenty more to do.  I have a porringer just for beeswax and use deionised ironing water to process it as the water in London is too hard (the pH can start a saponification process i.e. it creates a chemical reaction that starts turning the wax into soap).