Paul Helinski

This week I’m returning to the subject of beekeeping, because the last one didn’t go as I had planned. If you watched the videos for that article, it turned out that one of my hives had gotten extremely aggressive, and I’m sure it turned a lot of people off to beekeeping. In this video I am rewinding to the beginning, where most people start, by “installing” package bees into a brood box. As you can see, I am bare armed in the video, and up until I discovered that one of my hives had become aggressive, I had worked my bees exclusively with bare arms. And that includes removing frames and extracting honey.

Some of you long time readers here may remember that I found a killer deal on a copy of a 100 round Beta C-Mag at the height of the Sandy Hook gun boom in 2013. It was at the Sportsman’s Guide. Other sporting goods retailers were price gouging and SG was selling that mag for what was at the time less than suggested retail price. I thought it was pretty cool. These days that mag is even $50 cheaper, but that isn’t the point of this article. I’m on the SG mailing list now, and just sitting around today I opened their current flyer and found a few prepping products that I have actually reviewed, at really low prices, and a couple I haven’t, but that I know are also really great deals. I’m going to be light on this column for a few weeks because my kids are out of school for Passover, so I figured I would just share this information, and give you my coupon code. ;)

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
-Mark Twain

This is my second installment in two weeks on stovetop baking. As promised, this week we take a look at a variety of kerosene stoves that I run with diesel fuel, using ovens made for the stovetop. It is not by accident that propane has become ubiquitous in camp stoves, because propane is never smokey and regulating the burn is easy with modern equipment. The problem is, propane requires a pressurized tank to store it, and by the gallon, propane is two to three times the cost per BTU of gasoline and diesel. Of gasoline and diesel, diesel is safer and easier to store, and of stoves that will burn diesel, the wick varieties are easier to control, and they don’t need pumping.

Resources: Portable Woodstove $58.95 Shipped on Ebay SilverFire Hunter Rocket Stove $219 Butterfly Oven – $79 St. Paul Mercantile Perfection Oven – Lehmans $219 Have you noticed that survival is almost always a Catch 22? And by that I don’t mean rimfire lol. What I mean is you have to make a choice in just [...]

Long term food storage is a fairly complex subject. All food eventually goes bad, so whatever we do to extend that time as long as possible, you have to think about it in those terms. Some foods, like rice, beans, grains, and even flour, in a proper container and with proper precautions, all covered in prior articles, will last up to 20 years. Canned food, bought at the store, could last that long, or even ten times that long, though after a few years the flavor tends to degrade. But from a survival perspective, that’s pretty good. I personally believe that in the grand game of extend and pretend musical chairs, the music has stopped, but you just never know. This could all burn down this month, or it could be years ahead. If you have a free or cheap source of meat, fish, or other high density protein, home canning is something you should consider.

A lot of these articles I write for those of you “in the trenches.” And by that I mean the people who have taken seriously the risks that we all face ahead, possibly this year, possibly even this month. Most things I write about I don’t expect a lot of you to go out and [...]

It is extremely rare that I suggest a product to you without testing it first, but this week I think it is prudent to let you know what is going on out there in the world of mosquito netting. Big surprise, prices are going up due to the Zika scare, and availability is going down. I got three order cancellations on Ebay in the past few weeks, from sellers in China selling direct from the factory. The spread of Zika is much more of a threat than we are being led to believe. By summer,as mosquito populations increase, cases of Zika will skyrocket, and when the first wave of babies in born in Brazil, from the estimated over 4,000 cases now, the world will be scrambling for ways to keep mosquitoes at bay. If you have females in your group in danger of getting pregnant, now would be the time to purchase some netting products yourself.

On March 2, 2016, GunsAmerica introduced a new program to promote both person to person private sales, and dealer sales to consumers at the local level. It is called FREE LOCAL.