Cool July Weekend

We had a beautiful unusually cool weekend and I took advantage of it to spend much of Saturday working in the garden.  Here my pole beans are blooming.

The cucumbers are starting to climb the fence support and are blooming profusely.

Here a little cucumber is forming at the base of a blossom.

Green peppers are starting to form on my pepper plants.

My row of eggplants is growing bushy. This is one plant that I don't grow so much to harvest the fruit -- I rarely pick an eggplant -- as I do just to watch it grow in the garden.  I like the way the plants look -- the large fuzzy leaves, the purple flowers and the large purple fruit.

The first planting of sweet corn is nearing tassel stage.

Many of the plants in my tomato patch are reaching the tops of their cages.

There are lots of green tomatoes on the plants, and I picked several ripe cherry tomatoes this week.

The first of many (too many) zucchini is starting to form on this plant.

The patch that I have devoted to ornament gourds is starting to fill in as the vines start to ramble.

This golden delicious apple tree is loaded down with fruit, though the raccoons are trying to fix that problem.

There are still a lot of plums on this plum tree.  I have never had a significant crop of these so I'm not sure when they ripen.

I watched these two white tail deer fawns frolicking in the front yard on Saturday morning.  One of them is caught in mid-frolic.

These Norton grapes -- an American wine grape -- are coming along.  I had to spray again for Japanese beetles as they were starting to become a nuisance again.

These Concord grapes -- the American all-purpose grape -- are coming along as well, though they don't seem to be fruiting as prolifically as some of the Norton vines.

Missing a Queen

One of my hives seems to have lost its queen.  This north hive has no brood and I had mistakenly cut off all of the queen cells that they had made to replace the queen thinking that I was keeping them from swarming.  I think they had already swarmed, and I was only preventing them from replacing  the queen who had left.  So, I added some brood frames from the other healthy hive last week and checked this week to see if they were working on a new queen.  There are still quite a few bees present, and this frame shows lots of honey (the white capped cells around the edges) and pollen (the dark cells in the middle)

This frame seems to be almost full of just pollen.  They seemed to have filled in much of the empty brood cells with pollen and honey in this hive.

The little cups along the bottom (right side) of this frame are queen cups -- the beginnings of queen cells -- though I didn't notice that they had larva in them yet.

This frame had a completed queen cell, and maybe two -- one of them I wasn't sure.  They are covered with bees here so hard to see.  So they did use some of the brood that I gave them last week to start at least one queen.  I added another brood frame from the other hive during this inspection to give them more material to work with in creating a new queen.  I think that I will wait three weeks to inspect again to give them time to get a new queen going, I hope.

This is a frame completely full of capped honey from the healthy hive.  They have two and a half, at least, boxes full of capped honey frames and I added a sixth box that they have just started to draw out with wax.

The have also built comb between the boxes and filled it with honey that makes a bit of a mess when I take the boxes apart for inspection.

This frame full of capped brood in the healthy hive shows me that there is a good active queen in that hive.

My garden continues to do well.  This is my ornamental gourd patch.

These are pumpkins and melons, with zucchini at the far end.

Here are my three plantings of sweet corn, with the final planting just starting to emerge, and the first one about knee high.

My tomatoes are filling out their cages and growing quickly.

I have lots of these green tomatoes on the plants.

Here I have, from front to back, broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, cucumbers with their supporting frames now up, and finally pole beans and peas in the back.

Hot July Weekend in the Garden

I had some time to get the tomatoes cultivated and set up all of the tomato cages.  I have some small green tomatoes on a few plants.

I also got my potatoes cultivated and hilled.  They are somewhat sparse as the seed potatoes were a bit rotted and completely sprouted when I got them in the ground.

I was also able to cultivate the gourds I had planted, which were full of grass.  The Honda mini tiller that I bought a few years ago makes this task much easier and quicker.

My grapes were under attack from Japanese beetles.  I had noticed some a few weeks ago and sprayed the American/French hybrid grapes, which suffered the most damage from these beetles in the past.  I didn't spray the American grapes -- Concord and Norton -- because they suffered little damage before.  This weekend though I found the beetles all over those grapes as well, as you can see from this group of beetles having way too much fun on my Concord grapes.  I sprayed all of the grapes with five gallons of Sevin.
I had the chance to check both bee hives this weekend and I was going to take pictures but forgot to put the memory card back in my camera before heading to the hives.  One hive (the South one) seems to be queen-less now -- no brood capped or uncapped that I can see, and the numbers aren't nearly what the other hive is.  They seem to be filling much of the brood area with nectar.  The North hive is going strong with two mediums full of honey on top and comb between each box that was packed with honey.  The process of taking the hive apart for inspection broke the comb between the hives and sent the honey dripping everywhere.  The bees in that hive were more agitated that usual with all of that going on.  I took switched two frames from the brood areas of the two hive hoping that this would give the weak hive the materials to make a new queen.  I could not actually see uncapped brood in the North hive either, but there was a lot of capped brood and no queen cells, so I am assuming there was some uncapped brood there that I wasn't seeing.  I plan to check the hive again next week to see if the bees are making queen cells to replace their queen.  If not, I may order a new one.  My smoker skills have improved as I kept the smoker going well through both inspections, using less paper for starter and more cedar chips packed in for fuel.