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.