I am not officially a beekeeper. Thanks to pointers from SEMBA and the folks at Turtlebee Farms, I am now up and running with two hives.

While I have purchased some equipment and supplies on-line, Turtlebee Farms, which is located near Byron Michigan was able to provide me with basically everything I'd need from queen excluders, to frames, to basically everything else. I'll be writing a series of blogs on my beekeeping experiences.

Beekeeping for Beginners

The first thing to understand about bee hives is the basic layout of a modern beehive. Beekeepers have got this down to a science. Here's a diagram of a typical modern beehive:

Typical fully configured beehive

When you start out, like me, in the Spring, you have just the hive stand (for the hive to sit on on the grass), the bottom board, and a hive body.  Inside my hive body I have 10 frames. These frames are what the bees use to build the foundation from which the queen will lay eggs into.  So at this point, there's no honey talk. The main goal is to provide an area for the queen to lay eggs in.  This hive body is typically called the "brood chamber".  When around 6 to 7 of these frames are covered with bees, I'll add a second hive body on top of it with another 10 frames in it in order to get them to expand.  And when that takes off, I'll probably add a third hive body for another brood chamber.  Then I'll put a queen excluder on top of that to keep the queen from laying eggs above that and start putting on hive bodies with 10 frames that will be used for honey production. But that won't be until July at the earliest.

Brad's Bees: May 21, 2007

So specifically what I have done so far is go to SEMBA, which is a local beekeeping club. While there, a nice lady pointed me to Turtlebee Farms which has classes on beekeeping and sells beginner hives, supplies, etc.  Everyone I've met so far has been incredibly nice and helpful. And admittedly, a big part of the reason I wanted to get into beekeeping was the opportunity to meet new people.

For my two hives, I've placed them at the back corner of the property I own that Stardock is on.  They are near some trees and facing south.  There's a ton of wild flowers nearby. Here are some pictures:

The two hives and their surroundings

Another angle

The land next door to Stardock isn't developed so it's a nice big empty area full of various wild flowers for them to go out onto.  For those interested in what Stardock's building looks like:

My office is the top right corner office.  The bee hives are essentially behind me as I take this picture

Also on our property is a nice turtle pond.

Inside the beehives looks like this:

Front of bee hives

Inside the bee hives

Right now, 3 of the 10 frames are covered with bees. The same is true with the other one. I'm feeding them some sugar syrup right now to help get them going.  The goal is that within the next 2 or 3 weeks that 5 of the 10 frames will be covered in bees.

Interesting observations

One of the things I've been surprised at so far is how docile honey bees are.  While I have protective head gear, clothing, and a smoker (smokers are used to calm bees by blowing smoke on them), I have not yet needed to use them. I simply go up to the bee hive, open it up and observe.  My son and I have the odd genetic thing of having no local reaction to bee stings (my son doesn't even react to the venom).  I haven't been stung in awhile so I can't say for sure if I will swell up or not when I get stung.  I haven't been stung yet but I expect to get stung quite a bit before the end of the summer.

But you can really get right up close to these guys and they won't bother you.  Even standing right in front of the hive is no problem.  So those who worry about neighbors keeping bees or whatever have nothing to fear. You could have a beehive 20 feet away and probably not notice any issue with bees.  Yellow jackets are a much bigger pain than bees (I hate yellow jackets, they're aggressive and buzz in your face but that's another story).

Some interesting bee facts

80% of our food supply is dependent on honey bees in one form or other. A lot (if not most) beekeepers who make a living on beekeeping make their money through pollination services. In California, you can make $140 to $160 per leased bee hive.  So if you have a couple thousand beehives you could definitely make a good living. 

What's next

This year I'll probably stick with the 2. I'd love to get up to 4 hives this year but I don't see any likelihood of that.  I'd love to catch some swarms but those are few and far between around here I suspect.  We'll check back in with the bees in week or two to see how they're doing.

Before I leave you all forever to start my new career as a beekeeper, I thought I should get back to writing the occasional skinning blog again that many people seemed to have liked.  There's been so much going on lately that it's hard to keep track of it all.

Probably the biggest piece of news this week has been the fact that WindowBlinds 6 is going to support titlebar/border glass blurring on Windows XP (see the screenshot up there).  That's obviously a pretty huge thing. I wish we could have done that  a year ago but then again, the video card drivers weren't up to par then. 

Users of Object Desktop have no doubt started to see things really starting to move again. With the preview of Object Desktop 2008 out, the tip of the iceberg of new cool stuff becomes available.  Of course, the challenge now is that about 15% of our users are using Windows Vista and another 85% are using Windows XP.  How many of those Windows XP users are going to be migrating to Vista soon? That's anyone's guess.

I've been having a lot of fun with the new ObjectDock Plus.  The weather docklet that comes with ObjectDock (free and Plus) is actually pretty useful.  It also was a huge pain in the rear end because we're actually hosting the weather data ourselves. That's right, Stardock's actually a weather data provider now! Ack. So we've had to quickly learn how to handle a lot of weather data requests.

For those of you running Windows Vista Ultimate, make sure you have DeskScapes (and Windows DreamScenes) installed.  There's been some really neat stuff lately in the animated wallpaper world.    Even now, 5 of the top 30 most popular downloads this month have been animated wallpapers (though 16 of the top 30 are WindowBlinds). 

This week, Stardock Design released two Dreams.  One was an animated shark pool and the other one was released as a Master skin and took considerable work but is a photo collage in which images from your computer are taken and placed on your desktop background in real-time in a very visually pleasing way to form a living wallpaper.

There's a lot of really cool stuff in development on that end including an incredibly cool one in which the user selects a reflection map and a ground background and then their desktop looks like a little pool or pond or something.  It's a dynamic dream so it's all done on your video card and hence uses little CPU.

One thing I'm getting very anxious for is the DesktopX 3.5 beta.  I just want that out the door so that we can get to DesktopX 4.0 which is going to be such a huge change (I'm looking forward to a new Photoshop like layer editor for DesktopX).  So what's the hold up? DesktopX 3.5 can export content to the Windows Sidebar.  And given how powerful DesktopX widgets/gadgets can be, you can imagine why this is a pretty big deal.

Well that's all for now.  I have go now and pick up my bees!

Scott Brodie, who helped develop the weapons effects systems for Galactic Civilizations II while working here as a summer Intern is at Microsoft these days and his first game project has been released.

Here's the official press release.

You can go to the official page here.

I have a saved game in which there are so many ships and other objects that on my Quad-SLI nVidia 7950 I only get 3 frames per second using 1.6 beta 2.

But in the current internal build, scheduled to go up later this week we hope, we're seeing 30+ frames per second. A 10X performance improvement.

How? Even though 1.6 is a "point release", we have back ported part of the new graphics engine from the upcoming fantasy strategy game that is in development. Mind you, only a piece of it, but enough to make a huge performance improvement.

I am just incredibly excited to find out how people react to the speed difference here. It should make a massive difference for players playing on all sizes of galaxy. 

1.6 has slowly turned into the performance tuning release.  1.6 beta 1,2,3 included new features but they've seen things such as the mini map and graphs rewritten in Direct3D to help performance on Windows Vista (which also helped all users too since it is faster). 

We will definitely be looking to find out how much of a change people notice with this next beta.  Hopefully beta 2 and 3 that are up (1.59.095) have shown significant improvements. The next update will be the biggest yet.

Stardock has released the first BETA of TweakVista.  In a team-up with popular tweaking site TweakVista.com, this new utility is designed to let users maximize their control of Microsoft's new operating system.

TweakVista has dozens of useful features for maximizing performance and productivity including:

• Ability to control Microsoft's UAC handling
• Integrated control of not just what programs and services are running on start-up but a community-driven system for describing what those processes are.
• Pre-installed profiles for getting the most performance out of Windows Vista -- i.e. tell if what you want and TweakVista knows which services can be turned off (by default, there are a ton of things being run on start-up that most users will never use).
• Detailed system benchmarking and analysis
• Tweaks for Internet performance, visual performance, and hard disk performance.
• Analysis of running programs along with information about what they are doing.

This first beta is only available for users of Stardock Object Desktop. The final version will be available as a stand-alone program as well.  To learn more go to www.tweakvista.net.

TweakVista Home Page

Most of you may only know Stardock as the PC game developer and publisher.  But we are also the world's leading desktop enhancement software company.

One of our most popular programs, WindowBlinds, is about to go into beta for its 6.0 version. WindowBlinds is a program that lets users apply "skins" that change the look and feel of the Windows GUI.  One of the new features in WindowBlinds 6.0 is the ability to blur title bars.

Check out this article that includes a screenshot and how to get it early.

WindowBlinds 6 will be able to do blur effects on Windows XP too!

Want to get WindowBlinds 6 early? Get Object Desktop. The beta is coming soon!

Users can also control the level of transparency in a given skin as well!

This past week my son and I visited Turtlebee Farms. It's an amazing place located just outside of Byron Michigan.  Turtlebee Farms has seasonal classes on caring for honey bees.

Alex and I have decided to become hobbiest beekeepers.  We've gotten a lot of equipment and a place for the bees prior to going but we haven't yet actually acquired bees.  We wanted to make sure we were fully prepared for the responsibility and effort involved in taking care of honey bees.  Plus, I wanted to make sure my son would be able to handle being up close and personal to bees.

Here's some pictures:

Mr. Bennett shows us how to takes bees from a Nuc and put them into a new hive.

My son and some other children around a hive. Honey bees can be very docile, especially when there isn't any honey to defend.

There's a reason why it's called Turtlebee farm. There's a pond with an amazing number of turtles in it at the farm. The water is literally rippling from so many turtles (think many dozens of Painted Turtles).

Mrs. Bennett made bread while we were there from scratch and the entire class was very informative and helpful.  Before coming, I had read up on a couple of books on beekeeping as well as researched what I could on the net but found my understanding greatly enhanced from the class. 

One other observation about the class that I thought was particularly interesting was that nearly every other child (and possibly every other child) was home schooled. My son goes to public school and I had taken him out of school that day to take him to this. But the sense of parental involvement was very tangible and the people incredibly nice with very well behaved children attending (a far different experience from my experiences in chaperoning field trips for my boys where the kids seem out of control often times).

Turtlebee Farms sells everything you might want to become a beekeeper as well as a wide selection of honey based products.  It was a really enjoyable time. If you live in the lower peniulsa of Michigan and are curious about learning more about honey bees, I highly recommend Turtlebee Farms.

So that game you've been waiting for finally comes out.  You've read the previews of it.  You've watched video demos of it. You've lived through the delays and the you now have the box in your hands.

You install it and start to play it and then you make the discovery -- your computer isn't fast enough to run it.  You thought you had a good computer but no, no it turns out that you have to lower the display settings way down to play the game.

Why is this the case? The answer is this: Marketing.  There is little value in making a game run well on your computer because game developers aren't punished for not having optimized their code as long as the game will run on your machine with lower settings. 

And if you complain about that, you will be told that your one-year old video card is "ancient" and told to "get a new video card".

Which is a shame because most games could run much faster than they do if there was a good reason to optimize for it.  When Sins of a Solar Empire comes out, people will no doubt marvel at its great graphics. But will anyone (or any review) make notice that it has state of the art graphics and can run on older machines? People in the beta have certainly noticed how fast the game runs despite having better graphics than a number of shipping games with cutting edge graphics. I.e. it runs faster with better graphics than many shipping high end games. 

Are turn-based strategy gamers different? We'll be able to gauge by the 1.6 release.  Around 200 engineering hours have gone into just performance tuning for 1.6.  The mini map has been rewritten in Direct3D and we've back ported some of our new game engine features from our upcoming fantasy strategy game (which has crazy advanced graphics technology but that's another story). 

The net result is 1.6 should be a major jump in performance over 1.5X.  That isn't to say there aren't a bunch of other cool feautres in 1.6. There certainly are.  But performance is where the bulk of the work has gone.  New features (real meaty ones anyway) will have to wait until 1.7 it appears.

Stardock has released Keyboard LaunchPad 1.6.  Keyboard Launchpad is a program that allows users to easily assign hot keys to any number of common computer functions.

For example, users can use Keyboard LaunchPad to assign hot keys to things such as:

• Programs
• Websites
• Media Player controlling
• Clipboard snippets
• System Commands
• and more

A free SDK exists that allows users and companies to assign system wide hot keys to virtually any function in any given program.

Keyboard LaunchPad is a free download. The full version allows for an unlimited # of hot-keys and is $9.95 or can be purchased as part of Stardock's Object Desktop suite of desktop enhancement utilities.

Version 1.6 adds categorization of hot keys, Windows Vista support, and the ability to assign hot keys to control iTunes(R) music player.

Its home page is https://www.stardock.com/products/klp.