Month: September 2018

Cat update: RIP, new feeder, cuteness

It’s been over a week since the previous cat update. Many apologies to the zero people eagerly awaiting another update. (Actually, there may be a non-zero number; I have had some nice feedback on the cat posts, which I greatly appreciate.)

Firstly, some sad news. You may recall the alien black cat that has been visiting our cat house (pictured in the above-linked post). Unfortunately, someone hit this cat as it was crossing the street, and we found it dead by our front fence. We figured it was a feral or stray (since it didn’t have any collar), so we gave it a respectful burial in the little graveyard we have for our pet cats. A few days later, Jenn saw a sign asking if anyone had seen a black cat, so she called the owner to give them the bad news. They were appreciative, and I’m sure it’s best to have closure, but we know how sad it is to lose a pet cat.

Here’s our cat graveyard, overlooking the pond, with memorial stones for our previous cats, some grass that Pixel used to like, and cat mint:

On to other topics. We’ve still been visited by raccoons and a possum regularly, as they’ve learned they can often find food left in the feeder:

Though sometimes not:

Possum:

So to try to eliminate that temptation, I have replaced the automatic feeder with an internet-connected model. This new one will dispense on a schedule like the old one, but also has an app. So I can have it dispense an amount of food that the cats are pretty much guaranteed to eat, then use the app to manually (and remotely) dispense addtional portions as needed, ensuring that they don’t leave any food to attract the unwanted visitors.

Here’s the new feeder in the cupboard above the feeding area, along with spare food, the light remote, an Eero internet router (to extend the Wi-Fi range), plus camera and heating pad plugs:

The app lets me adjust the schedule, dispense custom amounts manually, see the feeding history, and other info:

I just installed that today, so I’ll fine-tune the meal amounts till I figure out the right amount. Hopefully I’ll be able to eliminate leftovers, and thus phase out the non-cat visitations. We’ll see!

Anyway, that’s the news of the week, so let’s close out with an assortment of cute cat pics:

New shrubs behind the cat house, to eventually make it a bit less exposed:

Cat by the beehives:

Bee inspection: removing supers & adding treatments

Today we did an inspection of the beehives. This was a big inspection of all four of the hives, plus we removed the honey supers on the two that had them (no more honey harvested), tested for mites, added mite treatments, added pollen patties, and added sugar syrup feeders.

Here’s Jenn inspecting the purple hive, with the test equipment and liquid smoke:

A nice frame of brood, with honey in the top corners:

The purple hive always gets really cranky when opened up. Here you can see lots of bees swarming around Jenn:

I recently put the mobile cam over by the beehives, as an experiment, so it captured us doing our inspection (you may be able to see the cloud of bees behind Jenn here too):

A selfie with several bees around me:

I got stung today, too; the first time I’ve been stung during an inspection. I stepped away from the hives to activate my phone camera, and one got me on the back of the hand as soon as I took off my glove. I can barely see the sting point at present, or feel it much, but it’ll probably swell up over the next day.

Here are bees on top of a box. You can see some white ones in the middle; they are coated in powdered sugar from the sugar shake mite test. The other bees will clean them off:

The bees have pollen patties to help feed them for the winter:

Here’s another cam shot of our inspection:

Scraping off the top of frames, to keep them tidy and easy to access:

A very nice comb of honey (for the bees winter supplies):

Lots of bees and honey:

The hives are now in winter mode; we’ll do more inspections and mite treatments over the next few weeks, to help them get ready for winter. We’ll also continue to feed them sugar syrup and pollen patties, to help them survive the coming cooler weather when they can’t go out and forage.

A bit of gardening: flowers & shrubs

Today we did some gardening. Firstly we cleared out one of the flowerbeds, moving things we wanted to keep to other beds, then spraying and hoeing the remainder (mostly weeds and dead flowers), then marked positions for planting with stakes, string, and spray paint:

We then planted some daylilies in triangle patterns, with each triangle the same color. We only have three colors for now, but will be adding another three later, for a nice rainbow sequence:

We also planted some shrubs around the back of the cat house, to give them a bit more privacy (and the back isn’t super attractive; it was originally going to be somewhere where the back wouldn’t be visible).

They are Oregon Grape & Red Flowering Currant shrubs:

Finally, we planted some Ivory Halo Dogwood shrubs out the front by the dogyard, to help fill in a previously useless corner of the field, and give more privacy for the swimming pool. I’ll closely mow and bark this area later:

A productive day!

One year of feral cats

Yep, it’s another week, so another cat update.

But more importantly, it’s been a year since we first found the feral cats, or rather the kittens, and their mother, Poppy.

Here’s a picture from my first blog post about the kittens, published one year ago today; click the link to see more:

My how they’ve grown!

You may recall from last week that I turned on the heating pads and held open the door to the shelter part of the cat house, hoping that they’d start sleeping in there. This has worked out well. Most nights, at least one cat has spent most of the night, and often several.

Here’s the first guest, Porcini:

The following night, three cats:

Two of whom stayed all night:

However, Spud got a bit curious about the camera, disloging it from its magnetic mount (hanging on by the power cable):

Two mornings running:

Cute angled shot:

Here’s what the camera looks like:

To prevent further issues, I built a wooden enclosure, that both holds the camera in place, and protects it a bit, much like I did for the feeder cam:

Here it is installed:

We also had an encounter between the alien black cat and one of the mushroom girls:

Some words were exchanged:

And a bit of posturing, before the black cat made a hasty retreat; they didn’t actually come to blows:

Makes you want to bury your head:

Another exciting development was when we saw all five cats at once; we hadn’t seen more than four at a time for months, so had wondered if something had happened to one of them.

Here’s a screenshot of my iPad, showing one cat outside, two in the shelter, and two in the feeder:

Let’s finish off with some random interesting pics.

Mirrored sleeping cats:

Poppy:

Stretch:

A snuggly pair:

Hunting:

That’s it for now.