Monday 17 August 2015

The short life and fast times of a beekeeper

A couple of years ago I decided I wanted to try beekeeping - nothing big - just a little hive in the back garden. I wasn't bothered about harvesting honey, or making stuff from wax, it was just that I read so much about bee populations in decline and I thought I could build a hive and give some bee's a place to stay, you know, do my bit to help them along and in return they could pollinate my strawberries.

Also I find bees pretty fascinating – they are the ultimate in natural decentralized decision making. They are like a distributed computing system made up of thousands of small multi-purpose nodes which on their own can't achieve much, but when they communicate and work together amazing things can be made possible.

So I downloaded these top-bar hive plans and got to work:  http://www.biobees.com/build-a-beehive-free-plans.php

Newly built hive, not quite finished

After the hive was done I read everything I could get my hands on about bees, and specifically how to attract them. And then waited. And read. And waited. And waited and read.

Hive today, completed with felt roof, stained wood, bottom board and entrance holes.

For some reason I thought it would be like 'Field Of Bee Dreams' – build it and they will come. They fucking didn't.

This year I did the same as the previous two spring/summers to try and attract a swarm. Starting in May, every couple of weeks:

  • rubbed the inside of the hive and entrance to the hive with pure bee's wax
  • scattered drops of lemon grass inside the hive and on the tops of the top bars
  • blobbed some honey inside the hive, on the bottom board, to try and drum up some interest

When it got to the start of July I thought that was it for attracting a swarm for this year, and thought I should probably save up and just buy a nuc next year. Then in the second week of July a swarm moved in.

I was over the moon!

I thought they might be hungry – but didn't want to disturb them just yet, so I made a jar feeder with 1:1 sugar water and hung it on the end of the hive.

After a week the bees had shown absolutely no interest in the sugar water, but they seemed busy going back and forth – in and out of the hive. I decided to open up the hive and see what I had.

I had attracted the smallest swarm of bees ever. They were in a cluster on the front inside wall of the hive, above the entrance holes, in a ball slightly larger than a tennis ball. Aren't swarms meat to be an amazing sight to behold, comprised of thousands of bees all moving into a new home?

They had made no attempt to start building comb either and seemed to be happy just sat there in a cluster. I guess with the swarm being attracted so late in the season and it being so small that it must be a cast. Since my new colony was so tiny and they didn't want sugar water, I ordered some Ambrosia Fondant from a near by bee keeping supplier: http://www.abelo.co.uk/shop/apifonda-2-5kg/

Ambrosia feed paste

When the fondant arrived, I did another hive inspection. I was expecting to see some comb drawn as it had been two weeks since they had moved in and swarms are meant to be notorious for being fast builders I thought?

They had built a couple of inches square of comb on one bar. This was turning out to be nothing like what I had read about swarms.

I figure because of the bad weather and lack of comb for honey stores, they really must be hungry now. I cut some holes in the bag of fondant, hung it from one of the top bars, and placed it right next the cluster so the bees didn't have to go too far and get too cold to reach it.

Because I'd opened the hive twice in two weeks, I decided I should probably leave the bees alone for a while now that they have started building comb and have a massive bag of food if they need it.

Fast-forward two weeks – For two days now there has been been a massive drop off in hive activity. I might see a bee going in or out of the hive every ten minutes. But then again, why would they need to be out and about? Maybe they are keeping warm, eating the fondant, building comb and just popping out now and again to get water and pollen, surely they have everything they need to get on with comb building and brood rearing right?

I thought I'd best check.

I opened the hive today to find about a dozen worker bees in there - that is all.

They had eaten some fondant, and built a tiny bit more comb, and even tried to rear some brood - half of which is black and dead in the cells.

First comb with dead brood, and what looks like some attempts at queen cells.

Second and final comb, barely begun.

Oddly there are no dead bees on the floor of the hive, it just looks abandoned, apart from the dozen or so which were left behind.

I don't know what went wrong really, I know the swarm was weak to start with, but I thought with some attention and care I would be able to help them become stronger and even get them through the winter.

It's all so disappointing. I only got to spend one month as a beekeeper, I guess I'll clean out the hive when the last bee leaves and try to do a better job next year.

Tuesday 10 March 2015

Desktop Upgrade – Part 3

With my hardware tested and running well at stock speeds in part 1 and part 2, it's time to try for an overclock.

The Asrock Z97 motherboard detects the G3258 on boot up and prompts you to press the P key to enable 'Pentium Anniversary Boot'. Really this is just some pre-configured settings to get you started overclocking. Pressing P will gives you the following screen with some clock speeds to choose from:

I like big boosts and I can not lie

Obviously, when presented with this screen, you're just going to nail it straight on to the 4.2GHz option and see what happens.

Testing

I fired Prime95 up again with the same 'Small FFTs' torture as in part 2 and monitored temperatures using the Linux command 'sensors'. The temperatures reported were about 20°C hotter than before, but held absolutely solidy at the 60°C mark for two hours:

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +60.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +60.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +52.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

+1 hour

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +60.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +60.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +51.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

+2 hours

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +60.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +60.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +51.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

No errors or warning were reported during the tests:

[Worker #2 Mar 8 22:03] Worker stopped.
[Worker #1 Mar 8 22:03] Torture Test completed 177 tests in 1 hour, 43 minutes - 0 errors, 0 warnings.
[Worker #1 Mar 8 22:03] Worker stopped.
[Main thread Mar 8 22:03] Execution halted.

Overclocked Benchmark

I benchmarked the new setup at 4.2GHz using the same tools and tests as used in part 1 and part 2.

I ran GeekBench three times to make sure the results were consistent:

RunSingle-Core ScoreMulti-Core ScoreFull Results
1st35956562http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2054643
2nd36006567http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2054658
3rd35916558http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2048367

Disappointingly the GPU benchmarks with the 4.2GHz 'Pentium Anniversary Boot' configuration came out exactly the same as at stock speeds in part 2, so I wont include them here. I suspect some custom settings tuning may yield better results.

Compared to the benchmark from part 1, my overclocked system is almost three times as fast on single core performance and twice as fast using multiple cores:

TestNumber of times faster
Single-Core Score2.8x
Multi-Core Score2.0x

Tweaking

The BIOS comes with loads of options for OC tweaking:

Tweak my MIPS harder

The core voltage looks a little high on the pre-configured overclock settings, so I've reduced that slightly, and I need to optimize settings for GPU and RAM, but for now I'm happy with my 4.2GHz clock.

There are some good tutorials out there for OCing this kind of rig. In the future I'll give a this guide a go and post the results here.

Desktop Upgrade – Part 2

My new hardware came and it looks a bit like this:

Looking sexy

First things first - time to rag out my old kit and clean out seven years of accumulated dust.

Before: I wish my girlfriend was this dirty (that's not really my PC).

After: Loads cleaner than your mucky mother.

Brilliant, time to put it all together, that heat sink is an absolute beast and it was a bit of a sod to bolt to the motherboard. The Asrock Z97 Anniversary motherboard is only about 2/3 the size of my old Asus so there is a bit more room for messing about with the drives.

Assembled: The heatsink fits in the Cooler Master Centurion C5 case no problem if you remove the pipe attached to the case side.

After a fresh install of Linux Mint 17.1 with the Xfce desktop, we're ready to rock. The Linux 'sensors' command show that things are running pretty cool at stock speeds:

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +27.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +27.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +26.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

Testing

Before attempting any overclocking I wanted to make sure the new hardware was stable enough and cool enough with the out of the box configuration.

First I used Memtest86 to make sure that there were no faults with the memory, downloadable here:
http://www.memtest86.com/download.htm

Faultless

Memtest86 took about half an hour to run on 8GB RAM, and reported no errors after one pass. I couldn't really be bothered running it for more time - I was going to overclock it whatever the result.

Booting back into Linux, I installed Prime95 and ran the 'Small FTTs' torture test to bring the CPU up to full utilization. Prime95 is downloadable from here:
http://www.mersenne.org/download/

The 'sensors' command showed the temperature immediately go up to the low 40°C range, still pretty cool, and increase slow by about 1°C per hour:

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +42.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +42.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +38.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

+1 hour

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +43.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +43.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +39.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

+2 hours

ccoretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +44.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +44.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +40.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

No errors or warning were reported during the tests:

[Worker #2 Mar 7 21:21] Torture Test completed 182 tests in 2 hours, 23 minutes - 0 errors, 0 warnings.
[Worker #2 Mar 7 21:21] Worker stopped.
[Worker #1 Mar 7 21:21] Torture Test completed 181 tests in 2 hours, 23 minutes - 0 errors, 0 warnings.
[Worker #1 Mar 7 21:21] Worker stopped.
[Main thread Mar 7 21:21] Execution halted.

Stock Benchmark

I benchmarked the new setup at stock speeds using the same tools and tests as used in part 1.

I ran GeekBench three times to make sure the results were consistent:

RunSingle-Core ScoreMulti-Core ScoreFull Results
1st28715180http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2048335
2nd28695178http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2048351
3rd28695178http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2048367

I ran each of the GpuTest fullscreen benchmark scripts, as before:

ModulePointsFPS
Triangle39818663
Plot3D371861
FurMark3946
PixMark Volplosion1762

Compared to the benchmark from part 1, my new system is roughly twice as fast:

TestNumber of times faster
Single-Core Score2.2x
Multi-Core Score1.6x
Triangle2.0x
Plot3D1.7x
FurMark2.8x
PixMark Volplosion3.2x

Part 3

Desktop Upgrade – Part 3

Tuesday 3 March 2015

Desktop Upgrade – Part 1

I've not upgraded my desktop hardware for nearly seven years, so it's time for some new kit. To know how much extra bang for my buck I'm getting, I want to do a direct comparison between my current hardware and my new hardware, with the new kit running at stock speeds and also overclocked.

Current Hardware

My current hardware looks like this:

CPUIntel Core 2 Duo E8400
CoolerStock
RAMCorsair 4GB DDR2 800MHz
MotherboardASUS P5KC ATX
GraphicsInno3D GeForce 9500GT 1GB GDDR2

Benchmark

I used GeekBench to profile CPU performance and GpuTest for graphics, downloadable here:

http://www.primatelabs.com/geekbench/download
http://www.geeks3d.com/gputest/download/

I ran GeekBench three times to make sure the results were consistent:

RunSingle-Core ScoreMulti-Core ScoreFull Results
1st12723242http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2019865
2nd12803244http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2019892
3rd13173244http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2019918

I ran each of the GpuTest fullscreen benchmark scripts, a couple couldn't run, the results of the ones which could are as follows:

ModulePointsFPS
Triangle20371339
Plot3D212735
FurMark1412
PixMark Volplosion540

Buy Stuff!

Now I'm thoroughly disgusted at the performance of my current rig it's time to buy some new stuff. I don't have stacks of cash to throw at this upgrade so I want to maximize performance per pound, easily overclock, and have further upgrade options in the future.

My new hardware will look like this:

CPUIntel Pentium Processor G3258£47.57
CoolerCooler Master Hyper 212 EVO£25.50
RAMHyperX FURY Series 8GB DDR3 1866MHz£52.99
MotherboardASRock Z97 Anniversary£54.00
GraphicsIntegrated Intel HD Graphicsn/a
 
Total£180.06

Not a bad price if this upgrade lasts another seven years.

There are some great prices on G3258 bundles out there, with the CPU already overclocked and ready to go, but they weren’t quite what I wanted, and I fancied clocking this myself. Some bundles I looked at are:

eclipsecomputers.com
dabs.com
overclockers.co.uk

Part 2

Desktop Upgrade – Part 2