Are you saying that you've killed some of the rats?

You sound like my daughter... Yes, there are traps set up that kill the rats. My aviary is set up with 2 doors to prevent birds from escaping and in that area I've set some traps up. I can clearly see the signs that rats have been active there. And no other wildlife should get in there .

I don't have any problems with you killing rats, I just wasn't sure whether that was what you meant. I hope you get rid of them all!

It has been a while now since I caught any rats...

But they are still there! The poison has been eaten from so I hope to soon have seen the last of them.

The traps that catch them alive have been rearranged. It was the 2nd time round I caught my Tiger (budgie) and had to release him from the cage. So now there's no longer a trap in the budgie area.

The cockatiels don't seem to explore that much, since I haven't caught any of them (or a finch or canary for that matter)

I think I'm rid of the rodents...

No more now holes have been dug into my aviary and the last placing of poison has not been disturbed.

So I'm carefully happy that I'm rid of a problem.

Not that the world is ever without...

I've been looking into bees as of late and am keen on starting to keep a hive or two myself. I shared my feelings and thoughts with my wife but she aks - and maybe she's right - if I don't have enough hobbies as it is...

Still... once you've been stung ...

Good riddance to the rats, and I hope they stay away! I've just started a project to trap a pesky ground squirrel that's been hanging around for a while, and showed up with a "friend" yesterday. I don't want a whole colony of them.

Do beekeeping take very much time? I wouldn't want them myself because bees scare me too much - we have killer bees out here so people have to be careful when they see a swarm of bees.

Don't want the bee's but luv the honey

I think, with colony collapse disorder, beekeeping may be a service to the planet, as well as good for the honey.

Several months back I read that colony collapse disorder seems to be going away, which is good news. Apparently things like this just happen sometimes. A lot of it is with commercial beehives that get trucked around all over the country in a "bees for hire" business, where farmers literally rent bees to pollinate their crops, and when that's done the beekeeper picks up the hives and moves on to a different farm. That has to be stressful on the bees.

Here's one of the articles I looked at. It has a nice graph showing that the number of hives has been rising fairly steadily since 2008. The article was published in July 2015: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... f9614c5c7b

As of July 2016 it was still being reported that it's not really a problem any more: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... ybees.html

I can't find anything more recent than that apart from reports saying that 2016 honey production in the US was up 3% over 2015. Presumably that means there were more bees on the job. There are still plenty of "panic" articles on the internet making it sound like there's an ongoing disaster, but the statistics seem to be telling a different story.

Well... yes and no.
No because you only need to tend to your bees when you notice something or want to harvest honey or beeswax or propolis or...

In fact I think you only have to work the hive from april to about august where you steal the honey for one last time.

During that time an average of once a week sounds believable.

Yes because, once you start, you tend to keep adding hives to your collection.

I'll put up a more detailed post in a different spot on the forums here...