Sadly as this warmer spell has come no bees have been flying. I realised two slightly weaker colonies hadn't made it through the winter. However, the other two colonies were flying and healthy at the end of February. When I opened them up they are full of dead bees, still some feed and honey and the bees apparently frozen in time. I had been feeding fondant, this may be part of the problem I will try sugar syrup next year but the colonies didn't dwindle they have just stopped. It is heart breaking to clean them out. It is also costly to replace them however replace we must and see how we go forward:(

We have been looking at transport again this week. My husband not only needs a car to get to work, but his work can involve driving and at times at short notice in bad weather to difficult places. The result is he needs a car to take him to work and stay with him.
Me? Well the year without a car has shown us we can largely do without a car other than for some of the kids after school activities and getting to the food co-op in the next village in bad weather.
Our resent purchase of a Zafira largely covers my husband's work needs and our needs when we travel as a whole family. However, those extra journey's that I drive are presenting us with a problem. Recently, I saw a Morris Minor Traveller which looked like it might do the job. Four seats, a large boot, fuel efficient petrol engine, no diesel particulate emissions, not too costly to buy and so far from new that it's effect on driving the consumerist society was minimal. Great all we need to do is find one. BUT
No surprise they don't have ABS brakes they in fact originally came with drum brakes but these can be improved with servos or changed to disk brakes OK. It only has two doors, one of my things about two doors is how quickly you can get out of the back in an emergency, generally the answer is not very. So this is a problem, the can would only be travelling locally but the impact of an accident isn't your speed it is the closing speed of the two vehicles and how heavy they are, so depends what hit you and how fast. Still locally we have speed limits no greater than 50 mph so should be OK. Then the deal breaker, head rests. I had a photo of a woman sat smiling in accident and emergency with a white T-shirt on and pink lipstick. On the middle of her T-shirt is a mark of the same colour pink. She has been in a car accident and her neck was bent so far forward that her lips touched her T-shirt! This wasn't a high speed impact. So we need head rests. We have looked and looked this doesn't seem an option so no Morris Traveller back to the drawing board:(.

Our electricity use has been taxing me this week. It started with a need to replace the light in our ongoing bathroom project. Trying to find something we liked was tricky but to make it low wattage and bright enough felt impossible.
The bottom line on bulbs is essentially old tungsten bulbs used 60 - 100W per bulb, halogen bulbs use 50W, compact fluorescent bulbs(CFLs) used 7 - 20W and LEDs use 1 - 5W as far as I can see. It makes sense that new lights are as electricity efficient as possible. Finally we found a nice light that takes LED G9 bulbs. This means rather than using 200W to light the bathroom we will be using 10W. I like that.
This got me thinking about the CFL bulbs we use and would it be worth converting to LEDs? As bulbs blow definitely, if we changed them all today we could save up to 1/6th of our electicity use. This doesn't, unfortunately, but comes to 600kg of CO2 per year. So I think I will do a bit of both. Convert or upgrade light fittings progressively to allow LED bulb usage and upgrade to replace blown bulbs. I have also discovered I can change the transformers on some of our low voltage halogen lights. It is also possible to put PIR switches on lights that tend to get left on so they switch off automatically. So more to do.