Summer moves on

The weather remains fairly wet.  We've had some hot days in the low 90s but this weekend was very pleasant in the 70s.  My zuchinni are shown coming up here amount the weeds.  We had a good rain right after I planted all of my gourds and melons and these were coming out of the ground in a few days.  The damp soil has delayed my weeding, though.

My tomato patch needs weeding to but is growing with all of the rain.  I do need to get my cages up soon.  I replaced the six plants that I lost to the heavy rains with a few poor looking transplants that I had left but they are surviving and coming along.  I need to do some weeding here too.

I plant my sweet corn in three phases about two weeks apart, so with my late start this year I am still waiting on the last phase.  The first planting is up and almost a foot high now.  

I have pole beans between the first two poles and peas between the second.  It is quite late for peas but we will see what happens.  I need to get the netting up to climb for these real soon.

The fruit trees are coming along well too.  This is a Golden Delicious apple tree that has not borne fruit for three years or so as it was hit hard by borers, but it is recovering with the loss of a few limbs and is setting on very heavily this year.

Peaches are also setting on heavily.  I really should have thinned these.

Also asian plums are setting on well on this tree for the first time this year.

My blackberry plants are producing for the first time this year and are setting on well.  They had a longer bloom time than I expected -- some blooms are still there as some fruit is almost ripe.

My concord grapes are setting on pretty well this year and I may actually have enough to do something with.

These Norton grapes are also setting on heavily on some of the vines that have climbed the support trellises. 

The bees are still finding some forage though their main honey flow is probably about over.  Here a bee is working the white clover growing just outside the garden fence.

I did check my North hive today and wasn't quite sure how it was doing.  There were lots of bees but not as much brood as I would have expected.  There were also several swarm cells on the bottom of the brood area.  I will check them again in a week.  I only popped the top on the south hive and it appeared to have completely filled and capped the fifth box with honey so I guess I need to either get more boxes or an extractor.  

The bees are booming...

I had gone more than three weeks without any hive inspection and a couple weeks longer than that without a full inspection going beyond the top box.  I had a chance to do a longer inspection today but still didn't make it into the bottom box on either hive, in part due to the heat, and in part because my smoker wasn't staying lit.

The North hive has quite a few bees on it and more than the other hive.  I had stopped by to look at the hives earlier in the week and there were many more bees than this on the outside of the hive.  I have read that this has to do with the heat and humidity, and is normal behavior.

I had added a fourth box to both hives just before leaving on vacation for two weeks as the hives seemed to be fully drawn out on three boxes, the South hive slightly more than the North.  This is the first frame pulled out of the top box on the South hive and it is fully drawn out and full of uncapped honey.

This is the center frame out of the top box.  It shows was the only frame that had some capped and uncapped brood in it.  The yellow part is brood and the white is capped honey.  There is some comb on the bottom of the frame as well.  I could use an excluder to prevent the queen from getting to this top box so there would be no brood in with the honey, but some people say that the excluder discourages worker bees from going up into the box to store honey, so I thought I would try going without it.

This is another frame out of the middle of the top box, full of honey with some of it capped.  This frame also shows some additional comb on the bottom.  This may be related to crowding as the bees had completely filled the frames.  I scraped all of this off.  The bees had been sticking things together much more than before and I had to pry boxes and frames out more than in the past.

This the second frame out of the third box ( top box of the brood chamber part of the hive).  It shows some brood (the yellow) but mostly a lot of capped honey stores for the bees.

The bees had put comb between the boxes and there was larva in this comb that was pulled apart as I pulled the boxes off.  This was between the second and third boxes on the South hive.  I believe that the brood in this comb was drone larvae but I'm not sure.

This is a frame from the second (North) hive -- I think from the top of hte brood chamber, showing brood and capped honey.  There seemed to be more drone cells in this hive than in the other, but not to an alarming extent.

This is also in the second hive, and you can see the raised domes of drone brood in the brood area.  This hive was not quite as filled out as the first one though it also had quite a bit of honey in the top box.  I added a fifth box onto the South hive but decided to wait a  week or so before doing so on the North hive as it was not fully drawn out yet.

After a break...

After a quick trip to California, I'm back to try to get my garden in.  Its very late this year due to a very wet Spring.  We had more heavy rain while I was on vacation, and I lost 6 of my 48 tomatoes that I planted just before we left, presumably to being drowned. out.  The remaining plants are growing, as are the weeds.

I finally got my potato patch planted about two months later than I would like.  I had bought the seed potatoes quite some time ago and they were heavily sprouted, but I hope some will grow.

I also got the first of my sweet corn planted.  I like to plant this in three stages for an extended offer.  This first planting was about a month later than I would like.

The late Spring was good for my fruit trees and they all seem to be doing well.  These are small apples coming on my Jonathan apple tree.

A heavy Asian plum harvest is a first, but this tree seems to have a lot of fruit.

Some of my grapes are poised to give me my first significant grape harvest too.  These are from my Norton vines and you can see the grape "flowers" in clusters all over the plant.