I drink tea every day. Usually I have a cup in the morning near breakfast - either during or just after. Then around mid morning I probably have another one. If I get sleepy late in the day, I'll have a cup of herb tea at the office....not because it will keep me awake - it doesn't have caffeine - but it will give me something active to do (drink the tea) to keep me from nodding off.
This morning I allowed my used tea bag to dry out and looked at it:
It definitely is quite small. I imagined how many it would take to fill a smoker and that blows my mind. Even if I collected and dried one or two a day, I think in a month I might have enough to fill the smoker for one inspection. I'm going to collect them for a while to see.
Now I'm not a big smoker user. Most of the time I blow a puff of smoke into the entry to tell the bees that I am coming in, but I generally put it down after that and don't pick it up again until I move to the next hive. Even at that, I go through a smoker full of fuel by the time I've finished looking at all the hives for that day.
I think I'll stick to pine straw.
Excellent idea! gonna try it!
ReplyDeleteI saved tea bags for a full week and didn't begin to have enough to light the smoker - one pint size glass jar filled. I couldn't begin to check my hives this way, but it seemed like a fun idea!
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