How to remove a Bee Swarm

We have a rotating compost drum in the back yard, and twice now I've seen some bees taking a tour of it, which made me a bit nervous. Well, this morning I went outside and I saw a huge wad of bees on the thing and it looked like they were settling down for good. Rather than look on the "internet" for suggestions, I tried a technique that I can only describe as a "bright idea".

The bees were on the shady side of the drum (it being about 10AM), and since the drum is painted black, I imagined that after Noon or so the sun would probably be beating down on them and they would decide it was too damn hot. Rather than wait around, I decided to speed things up.

Being in the midst of a bathroom remodel, I had at my disposal two mirrors. I simply placed each mirror about 15 feet away and angled such that the light was blazing on the bees. One mirror might not have been enough, but with two mirrors those bees were cookin'! Within 5 minutes a huge glob of molten bees plopped onto the ground. They rose up in a cloud of fury and seem to be gone, save a few stragglers still inspecting the drum. They never even approached the mirrors, so I believe it is safe to say they don't consider the sun to be a threat (who knew bees were so dumb?).

So, if you see a blob of bees hanging out on your property, find some mirrors and make their life unpleasant. They should go away. If they attack and kill you or anyone I take no responsibility!

Time Machine over Network Share

Here's what I did after reading several articles about this:

Open Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Connect to your network drive and save your password
Open Time Machine Preferences:
Select your Volume
Click Backup Now or wait for it to start.
Look on your volume and you will see a file called:
machinename_3493951911.sparsebundle or something similar
copy the first part not including sparsebundle
Wait for time machine to fail :-(
Open Disk Utility and click New Image
Paste in the name you copied and choose Desktop as the location. Change the type to sparsebundle. Give it a reasonable size and click create.

Unmount it and copy this file to your network drive. it should be about 80MB. Now go back to time machine preferences and reselect your network share. Click backup now and you are good to go!