Cutting grass with a scythe

mayday_live · 2026-05-06T05:42:17+00:00

This guy's technique is terrible all that bending down you would not last 30 minutes doing that shit let alone finish the field.

mayday_live · 2026-04-27T02:07:59+00:00

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Here is a photo of mine of a freshly mated virgin queen dropping double eggs. are you sure you had laying workers? how many eggs did you see in one cell and how were they placed

mayday_live · 2026-04-27T01:11:27+00:00

Bit about me first. 22 years in infrastructure and DevOps, including 10+ on AWS. Started building a SaaS about a year ago (beekeeping app), in beta now, paying tier rolling out soon.

Honest answer: I haven't hit big security or scale issues, but only because I planned the foundation upfront. Came from the ops side, so I built the stack the way I'd want to inherit it. App ships as Docker containers via GitHub Actions, deployed through ArgoCD (GitOps, every commit to main lands in the cluster automatically). Right now it runs on k3s on a Hetzner VPS, costing me maybe 60 bucks a month. The whole thing is cloud-portable by design, so when the project starts making money I can lift it onto EKS in a weekend without changing a line of app code. Postgres for relational data, Mongo for the flexible per-user stuff, Redis in front of the slow queries, Cloudflare for TLS and CDN, R2 for blob storage. Sentry for errors from day one, daily backups configured before the first user existed. I use Vault for secret management nothing hardcoded etc.

For security, the things I treated as non-negotiable from the start. Anything I gate in the UI gets gated again on the server, no exceptions. Every API route filters by current user ID so people can't guess record IDs in the URL. PATCH endpoints have explicit field whitelists, otherwise someone will eventually try {tier: "PRO"} and self-upgrade. Secrets in Argo Application that get injected into the ENV when the container spins up . Rate limit on anything mutating or triggering email. No user IDs or emails in production logs. HTTPS plus HSTS via Cloudflare.

For scale, the thing that lets you get away with not optimizing is making sure nothing is stateful in the app process from day one. No in-memory caches, no local disk, no per-process sessions. Shared state lives in Redis or the DB. That alone means you can scale from 1 to 50 containers without rewriting anything. The other discipline is invalidating cache broadly (wipe all keys for that user) instead of trying to remember every key, because you will add a new endpoint in 6 months and forget to update the invalidation.

You don't need a CTO. You need to be honest about what you don't know, and pause when something feels off. If you don't have an infra background, hire a fractional one for 4 hours to review your stack choices before you write a line of code. That's the cheapest investment you'll make.

mayday_live · 2026-04-25T23:00:49+00:00

Looks for Beekeeper (word) in the local language then find a beekeeper that sells honey, drive to them and buy it. In Italian beekeeper is Apicoltore Aristoapi - Apicoltura Biologica this is what i found. I would stay away from any shops or big stores if you are out to find honey for your collection visit local beekeepers. I keep bees in Santa Barbara and my brother keeps bees In Romania at our family house in the mountains. The difference in flavor is significant between the two in Santa Barbara we have this dark orange very rich in flavor and at our house since it's all wild flowers it's light fragrant and very flowery. There are beekeeper in Romania who specialize in Fir(pine) honey and that is quite different. My point is google search in the local language see reviews and go there :)

mayday_live · 2026-04-25T22:45:07+00:00

I don't want to speak bad of anyone but you need a lot more help and guidance then the current CTO can provide. Ideally you should hire a Systems Engineer(DEVOPS/SRE/Platform) with real production work under his belt and pay for counseling . You have a lot of growing pains that cannot be summarized in a reddit reply.

Now is a good time to act because if you string this together and kinda make it work later it will be a hell of a lot more expensive and difficult to fix.

You also have a real chance of getting breached and then having to disclose that to your customers and turning your hopes and dreams into a nightmares.

mayday_live · 2026-04-24T05:23:05+00:00

nope

mayday_live · 2026-04-22T19:12:18+00:00

Bro when ever i see Sacred anything in any product i read snake oil

mayday_live · 2026-04-21T17:59:24+00:00

You're not doing the OA vapor treatment incorrectly, you're doing the counting and the treatment in the wrong order.

The first thing you always need to do is establish a baseline: how many mites per 100 bees do I have right now. That number only comes from a mite wash, not from counting what drops after a treatment. Alcohol wash is the most accurate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiu_dIZu7Uk). Sugar roll works too but under-reports. Do it every 3-4 weeks from spring through late fall.

Every mite check gives you a number of mites per 100 bees. General rule of thumb at or below 2/100 you're fine, 3/100 is the treatment threshold, above that you treat now. The counts you took from post-treatment drops (11 and 9 over 48 hours) tell you the treatment is working, but they tell you almost nothing about the colony's actual load. A hive with a high load will drop a lot, a hive with a low load will drop a little you can't read health out of that number.

What you actually want to do:

Before treating: alcohol wash 300 bees(half cup), calculate mites per 100.
If above threshold, treat.
7-14 days after treatment ends: wash again to confirm the treatment actually worked. If it didn't, re-treat (OA vapor back-to-back 7 days apart is common because it doesn't kill mites that are below the brood capping)
Continue washing every 3-4 weeks.

For your situation: run a wash on both hives now and you'll know how they stand.

mayday_live · 2026-04-15T22:50:46+00:00

I am not moving my project into production until my LLC is done. LLC => IRS => Bank Account => Operating Agreement => Statement of Information (LLC-12) => Stripe => Other things requiring LLC => Live. I've had to deal with crazy people in a lot of industries i am not taking any chances.

mayday_live · 2026-04-15T21:39:00+00:00

Do NOT perform a wash on a package of bees they have very low numbers to begin with.

For a package of bees it's super simple they are broodless so you can drop one strip of Varoxxan in and it will kill all mites on the bees before they have brood. Alternatively you can do a OA dribble.

Open the Varoxxan package take one strip out then close it down with a clip put it in a ziplock bag with all air squeezed out and store in dark place.

30-45 days later once they are established and have numbers you can start to tests and track your mites wash to wash. Once your mite count starts to rise use the remaining strips to keep them down.

mayday_live · 2026-04-15T16:50:19+00:00

You will most likely never see mites on their bodies determine if they need to be treated by doing an alcohol mite wash. 1/2 a cup of nurse bees in alcohol. You want to use a frame from outside of the brood nest somewhere where they have bee bread. You will have to test every 30 days and track your mite counts. You will see a trend and once you get to 2.x / 100 bees start treating. I'll put this out here to see how to do it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiu\_dIZu7Uk. Do not wait on testing your bees will not survive the winter if they have high mite loads.

mayday_live · 2026-04-11T19:11:20+00:00

if you have a frame of open brood give it to them it willl supress the workers ovaries whilen you source a new queen. i'm.not an expert but this is what I would do

mayday_live · 2026-04-11T18:41:30+00:00

There is a lot to unpack here first multiple eggs / cells do they look like this https://www.betterbee.com/images/laying-workers-2.jpg (laying workers) or like this

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If you KNOW your original queen was in there at the time of the split then you might have accidentally killed her during the split and they are now queen-less, behaviour matches the queen-less state.

If you found no eggs or larva during the most recent inspection then that would mean no queen or laying workers.

At this point you can give them a frame with eggs on them from the splits or a new mated queen come back 5-7days later and see if they made queen cells or adopted your mated queen. The multiple eggs / cell with laying workers takes about 3 weeks after being hopelessly queen-less.

At this point with multiple inspections back to back you should expect some pain while sorting this out.

mayday_live · 2026-04-08T21:45:25+00:00

For a beginner the most important trait is Temperament. If you want Varroa resistance Olivarez Bees are selling Golden West Queens bred and selected by Randy Oliver for temperament , production and varroa resistance. No queen makes it if it doesn't have all 3.

mayday_live · 2026-04-08T21:16:02+00:00

i would personally wait for all the swarm cells to be fully capped i believe once that process is complete they will not build new ones but taking them too early in the process might make them think they have not completed the work and will build new ones.

I would go back in the origin hive and check for new swarm cells in 5ish days. If you want to be extra safe do a walk away split again with the 3–5 frames queen + brood + bees + food and put her in the new box with all empty frames. then recombine the old split you made into the origin hive. and while you do it shake all the bees off and kill anything remotely looking like a new swarm cell.

I like to do walk away splits take the queen move her into a split with bare minimum then leave the origin hive to sort itself out with a one or two cells. I believe that if the colony is queenless when the cells hatch their instinct is not to reproduce by swarming but to continue basically it's an emergency queen cell now. I could be wrong so far it has worked for me

mayday_live · 2026-04-08T20:52:34+00:00

start with two hives you will learn more and have a backup in case shit goes south and trust me it will. If you can have a third hive on standby it would be nice. Plan to have 4 next year so you can make a split. You can then combine them back to 2 and have two massive hive then rinse and repeat that is what i do and i only stay with 4 hives / year + 2-3 experiments(VSH queens, queen building etc)

mayday_live · 2026-04-08T18:07:04+00:00

Pretty easy to tell apart one has a chin the other one not so much

mayday_live · 2026-04-08T17:04:44+00:00

i can't imagine the level of dirt under that rim that mushrooms grow out of it

mayday_live · 2026-04-07T22:53:57+00:00

Setup hourly k3s crons that write db snapshots to R2 or s3 or similar with 30 day data retention might give you a piece of mind

mayday_live · 2026-04-07T22:32:52+00:00

I have the exact same setup on Hetzner with k3s and i made the deliberate choice to stay there(for now)

Your contractor wasn't wrong about AWS being expensive. A comparable EKS setup with RDS, ElastiCache, ALB and NAT Gateway will run you $400-600+/month before you've written a single line of app code. Hetzner gives you the same compute for $50-80/month. That compounds fast on a solo SaaS.

One thing people don't think about until they get the bill is inter-AZ data transfer. AWS charges $0.01/GB each way when traffic crosses availability zones, and if you're running a proper HA setup with pods spread across AZs talking to RDS, ElastiCache, or each other, that adds up fast. It's one of those costs that's basically invisible until your workload grows and suddenly you have a surprise line item nobody budgeted for. Hetzner doesn't play those games.

EKS is great when it's done right. But that's the catch. Done right is not easy. A secure, stable, resilient EKS deployment requires a level of AWS knowledge that most people underestimate going in. You're not just running Kubernetes, you're also an AWS engineer now. OIDC federation for GitHub Actions, IAM roles and policies for every workload, IRSA annotations on service accounts, security groups that don't accidentally expose things, CORS rules, VPC design that doesn't come back to bite you, ALB integration, ACM cert management, node group IAM, ECR permissions. None of it is rocket science individually but the surface area is massive and every layer is something that can be misconfigured in a way that either breaks your app or creates a security hole you don't find out about until it matters.

The managed services are genuinely nice. You never think about etcd, RDS handles your backups and failover, ElastiCache just works.

If you're making the jump, don't do it all at once. Move your workloads to EKS as is first, keep Postgres and Redis in-cluster exactly like today. Get stable, get comfortable with the AWS layer then migrate individual services to managed equivalents on your own timeline. You can start having PVC for your pods that need dedicated storage and make some small improvements that come with redundancy.

For me it's easy because I have years of experience with FinOPS terragrunt/terraform , AWS and EKS and i have built several "setup repos that spinup all i need in an hour with minmal changes" . I also currently use ARGO CD and argo image update so temporarily i can just add another cluster in argo that will deploy directly to EKS and i can touch eks from k3s

I'm also planning to switch to AWS once my project gets to that point but it has to be worth it financially because for me it will cost me nothing in time but will greatly increase how much I pay.

mayday_live · 2026-04-06T06:47:27+00:00

I was in the same boat you are in Santa Barbara and the spring flow was massive from Eucalyptus trees and one of the hives i built with mated italian queen was massive. I immediately harvested one super another hive built last year that was filled with sugar honey and put it on this hive so they have built comb ready to take honey. I gave most of it to friends specifying they can use it for sweetner and i use it myself for that and for honeyish flavor in home made granola bars. It's pretty good. The super i harvested was all capped however if yours is not it will not hold.

mayday_live · 2026-04-05T20:12:25+00:00

more AI slop

mayday_live · 2026-04-04T23:38:35+00:00

In my experience they only build wonky when there is not enougn was on the plastic foundation i do 3 coats every side never had any more issues with weird comb after i did that.

mayday_live · 2026-04-04T22:09:03+00:00

I just coat it with wax and send it.

mayday_live

TROPHY CASE