Two warm days

We've had two warm days at or approaching 80 degrees that seems to have kick started Spring into overdrive.

The wild phlox has burst into bloom.  These seem a little out of focus but actually the blurriness was due to them blowing around in low light while I was trying to photograph them.

This violet was pushing itself out of the leaves in among the trees bordering my garden.

The first apple blossom to open on my Earliblaze apple tree.  Other apple trees are quickly reaching the bloom stage.

These blossoms on my Montmorency cherry trees opened today too.

The buds that I photographed yesterday on my pear trees were open today.  I took these pictures too late in the evening to catch bees working the blossoms but I expect that they were busy today.

A beautiful day, eventually.

The weather was cloudy for most of the day, though it was warm.  Late in the afternoon, the clouds started to break up.  My peaches have been blooming and these pears are just about ready to burst into bloom.

After the sun started to break through the clouds, the peach trees were buzzing with bees.

This bee has a large sac of golden pollen on its hind leg to take back to the hive.

Of course, it's not just the plants that we cultivate that provide forage for the bees.  The dandelions are in their full bloom and provide a significant source of nectar and pollen for the bees.  For being a weed, dandelions really are pretty at this stage.

You can see here the orange pollen this bee has been gathering from the dandelions it visits.

I opened my beehives this afternoon, after the sun came out and the bees were actively foraging, for another inspection, now three weeks after installing the packages of bees.  The population of bees is clearly increasing, and there is now lots of capped brood on the frames, so the population will probably explode in the next couple of weeks.  You can see here that the bees have been building some extra comb on the bottom of the frame and had built a little along the top bar as well.  I had to scrape all of that off.

Here you can clearing see the capped brood -- the tan colored areas where the bees have covered over cells where larva are going through the final stage of metamorphosis into bees.  You can also see pollen stores along the top of the frame.

Here is more capped brood, with nectar and pollen stores along the top frame to the left.

Another frame with capped brood.  I believe if you look close, you can see some larva in the bottom of open cells at the top.

Here is brood not yet capped.  Small larva are just barely visible curled up in the middle cells.

A little more of a close-up so the larva curled in the bottom of cells is a little more visible.

The bees had drawn out comb on all but a couple of the frames in the first box so I added a second box to each hive to give them more room to make comb.  They had also emptied the sugar water from the top feeders in each hive and I added a half gallon to each, which is all that I had brought.  I will need to add more in a couple of days.

Spring marches on

Four deer come into the field west of our house to feed at dusk.  This was taken with a long telephoto that compresses distance.  The barn and vehicle are much farther away than they appear.   We see deer frequently on our place  Just before taking this picture, a couple of deer were in the front yard and ran into the woods when I came out of the house.

The garden in the early evening, with the full moon rising behind.  The plums are still showing their white blossoms and hte peaches are just starting to bloom.

I planted some tulips in a corner of the garden.  Tulips planted outside the fence were being eaten by deer.  Note the bug in the flower -- I thought when I took this that it might be one of my honey bees but it came out of the flower afterward and I saw it was some other kind of bee -- not a honey bee.

My small garden tulip bed looking west.

The first asparagus sprout of the Spring.  This is the third year for my asparagus so I plan to harvest some this year.

My rhubarb has seemed to have a hard time getting established.  I had planted three plants and only two survive, but after they both wilted and seemed to dry up early last summer in the drought, I really didn't expect to see them at all this year.  This plant actually looks fairly vigorous this year so I fertilized it generously and hope it will take off.

The other rhubarb plant is also putting out several leaves.  I gave it a good dose of fertilizer too and we will hope for the best.

My grapes are budding and getting ready to take off too.  I may be able to actually get some grapes off of some of my vines this year, particularly the Concord grapes that seem to be the most vigorous.  I do need to do more to keep the weeds down at their base, which I think is too much competition for the smaller vines.  I have 90 grape vines total, growing three rows each of Concord, Norton, Marechal Foch and Marquette.  I hope to use these to make my own wines when they become established.

A rainy week

 We had a very rainy week this week.  I have a bucket hung on a water faucet outside and found it had six inches of water collected in it from the rains we have had in the last couple of weeks.  Rain for several days this week brought on flooding and closed roads.  The wet ground will put off gardening for a while but it has been sunny and windy for the last couple of days which should help dry things out.  I covered my strawberry beds with straw as we had some freezing overnight temperatures with frost.  I noticed that the rhubarb I planted a couple of years ago is coming up.  I thought it might not reappear as it didn't do much last year.  I spread a lot of fertilizer around it yesterday to see if I can get it to become established.  I also heavily fertilized the asparagus which should be coming up soon.

The bees have been confined to the hive much of this week, I expect, by the cold and rain.  I took this picture yesterday and they were mobbing the small entrance hole.  You can see some hovering in front if you look close.

The plums were blooming this week.  I took this picture yesterday as well of one of my bees visiting a blossom on that tree.  The bees were not as numerous on these as on the apricot trees last week, but it was still pretty cool and windy when I took this.

Another one of my bees visiting the plums.  You can see the large pollen sack on her back leg full of golden pollen from the plum blossoms.  The bee above has some too but not as much.

I inspected my two hives this morning, now two weeks since I installed my packages of bees.  The outer frames are still not drawn out much -- this is the third frame in the first hive.

When I got to the middle of the hive though they were busy and had drawn things out well.  In fact, there was quite a bit of "capped brood" on the middle frames.  This is comb that the bees have capped over with wax because the larva inside have reached the stage where they start the metamorphosis into bees.  It takes the larva about 12 days to become bees once they are capped, so in two weeks I should start to see the population of my hives start to rise.

My second hive also had capped brood in a couple of frames.  I could see bees in both hives doing their dance that bees use to communicate the source of food.  I also saw some bees with bright red and bright orange pollen sacks on their hind legs, and wonder what the source of that was.

You can see that this is the next to last frame in my second hive, that seems much more active than the outer frames in the first hive.  These bees seemed a bit "off center" as they had filled more frames to the north than the south part of the hive.  I can move some frames around to even things out if they seem to be ignoring the south end.  You can see that there is an untouched frame left  in the box below, though.  I refilled the sugar water feeders in both hives as they both seem to have quite of bit of comb to build and the feeders were about empty.
My peach trees are just starting to bloom now and the pear trees won't be far behind, so the bees will have plenty to work on.

Bees -- First Inspection

We had a beautiful weekend and were home all weekend so I could get some things done.  I got my garden all cleaned off and ready to till when the soil dries out enough.  They are predicting a lot of rain through the next three or four days so it won't be soon.  I also pulled the straw off of my strawberries so they could start growing.  I may have to put the straw back if we have more frost.

My apricots continue to bloom.  I searched for a bee and saw a couple on Saturday morning.  I went back out in the afternoon and there was a steady hum with bees all over the tree.  I know that they were my bees because I have never seen that many honey bees on a blooming fruit tree before.  I'm anxious to see if it has an effect on the amount of fruit that is set.

The bees were back on Sunday morning.  I took these pictures then.  They were so quick in moving from blossom to blossom it was hard to catch them in focus.  I have a lot of poor pictures.

I could see on several of them that they were gathering pollen on the pollen sacks on their hind legs.  They were gone in the afternoon because the wind picked up.  My plums just started blooming this afternoon --just a few blossoms opened.  It was too windy for bees, but I hope that the bees get to them while they are open.

I also got some pictures of spring beauties coming among the oak leaves in the forest next to the house.  These have probably been up for a while but they only bloom when the sun is shining and we've had several cloudy days.

They were coming up all around the floor of the forest.  This one came up next to a rotting log.

The most exciting event of the day was my first inspection of the bees that I installed in hives last weekend.  This the fourth frame from the first hive (closest to the pond).  It is covered with a lot of busy bees.  The frames contain plastic foundation imprinted with the honeycomb shape and covered with beeswax.  The foundation looks like the yellow area along the far right side of this frame.  The white is the beeswax that the bees are putting on the foundation to make comb.

This is a frame with some "burr comb" on it.  Burr comb is comb built outside of the area of the frame where the bees are supposed to build.  This was one of the frames that had the queen cage between them, so there was more space than normal between the frames.  The bees build this burr comb in that extra space.  I had to scrape it off so that everything would fit together properly.  Aside from the burr comb, this frame seems to be drawn out nicely.

This looking down into the second hive.  Two frames have been removed to allow space to work.  You can see the burr comb between the frames that were holding the queen cage.  In this hive, the queen cage had fallen to the floor of the hive, but it was empty and I briefly saw the queen during my inspection covered with bees on one of the busiest frames.

There's one of the frames with burr comb attached.  It is otherwise drawn out nicely.  I did see larva in some cells in both hives so I know that I have laying queens in each hive, though I couldn't see the eggs.  Both queens must have been released from their cages on the day I installed the bees or the next day to have larva already in cells.  I might possibly have some capped brood cells by the time that I inspect next weekend.

Here is another frame from the second hive, with drawn comb and lots of bees working.  You can see the queen cage laying on the floor of the hive below.  Everything looked good in both hives and they seemed about equal in strength.  The both had some cells with pollen in them as well as some liquid -- either nectar or stored sugar water.  The bees didn't seem too disturbed about the process, though there seemed to be one bee that wanted to follow me around when I left the area.  She didn't follow me all the way to the car, though.

Cool and rainy day

It was a rainy mostly dark day today but my apricot trees burst into bloom.  Unfortunately, its turned cooler for the next few days and I fear that the cold and wet weather will keep my bees away from these blossoms until the weekend.

We had some thunderstorms tonight that knocked out the power briefly.  Temperatures are in 30s at night for the next few nights then back to 70 in the day on Sunday, so the cold should be short-lived.

The planted flowers aren't the only ones blooming.  These Dutchman's Britches were blooming in the woods along the north side of the yard.

These are among the first woodland flowers that I see and don't last long.

The buds on the plum trees are about to open -- I expect that they will be open tomorrow.

I'm a beekeeper!

We got the call on Friday that the two packages of bees that I ordered were coming in at Hannibal, MO, at 9 p.m.  There was a fair crowd there and the bee delivery was an hour or so late.  But, I got my two packages of Italian bees and got home.   I installed the bees in their hives on Saturday.

Here's my set-up for my two hives.  There is a pond in the background so there as a convenient source of water.  I am using all medium supers instead of the traditional deeps for the brood boxes of the hive.

This is one of my packages of bees sitting on top of a hive waiting to be installed.  Very few dead bees in the box.  The queen is in her own separate small cage inside the clump of bees.  Her cage was easy to get to and out of the box but didn't have a candy plug in it.  I think this might have been mentioned at our school.  I was prepared for the possibility though with some miniature marshmallows to fill in the plug hole  The idea is to allow some time for the bees to adapt to the scent of the new queen while they eat the marshmallow out of the entry way.  I am supposed to wait five days before checking to see if the queen has been released, and I'm anxious to get back into the hive to see how things are going.

The bees are placed in the hive by just spraying them with sugar water and then just dumping them out of the box through the hole in the top of the box and into the hive.  I found that process doesn't make them very happy.  You can't get all of them out of the box and you can see a clump of them in the corner in the picture.  You are supposed to leave the box in front of the hive like this so that the rest of the bees can find their way into the hive.  When I came back the next day the package boxes were empty and I took them away.

Here are both hives after the installation.  There are two hive boxes here -- the bottom one has the foundation and frames for comb and holds the bees and the top box of the hive hides a hive-top feeder with sugar water.  There isn't much nectar available naturally yet and the bees have a lot of work to do to create honeycomb on the empty foundation of the hive so the queen can start laying eggs.  So, you are supposed to feed sugar water to the bees in the early stages.  The bees are kind of clumping on the landing board of the hives, especially on the far one.  I'm not sure why they were doing that.

I have added an entrance reducer here -- the unpainted strip of wood at the hive entrance.  This reduces the entrance to a small hole so that the bees can more easily defend the hive while their population is still small.  I had a little trouble with this because the reducer was a little too wide to fit into the space.  I had to take it back to the house and trim off a little to get it to fit.  I should have tried it for fit before I installed the bees, but it wasn't a big deal.  I have visited the hives several times since installing the packages on Saturday.  I added some more sugar water today to the feeders as they were somewhat low. I have noticed quite a bit of activity in front of the hives a few times -- a dozen or so bees hovering around.  I wondered if this was robbing activity -- other bees trying to get to the sugar water inside as there isn't much nature food available -- but decided it was probably just the home bees jockeying for position to get in and out of the small entry hole.  The activity wasn't frenzied as I would expect with robbing and not a lot of loud angry buzzing going on.  I didn't see any bees fighting at the entrance as they do when robbing is going on.  And the activity hasn't been consistent -- first one hive and then the other, and didn't see that kind of activity at all today.  There is quite a bit of coming and going though, so perhaps they are finding some nature sources of nectar to forage.

The Spring weather does now seem to have finally arrived and the plants seem to be trying to catch up after a late start to Spring.  These daffodils started blooming this week, two or three weeks later than usual.

These white daffodils are blooming along our backyard fence.

These fragrant hyacinths popped up quickly by our front step.

The leaf buds on the lilacs along the garden fence are bursting open and you can see that the grass is greening up quickly.  The buds on the apricot trees and plums are about to burst open too and I expect that they will be blooming this weekend.  I need to finish clearing off the garden plots from last year so that I can get them tilled up as soon as the ground dries up enough.  The prediction is for more rain through the rest of the week with some potential for severe storms, so it may be while before I can be tilling.   I should start hardening off my plants, though, in another week or so.