And MORE snow

A prediction of "less than an inch" of snow for Friday turned into heavy snow that send me home from work almost as soon as I got there, for fear that I would not be able to get back in.  I think we ended up with five or six inches of new soft fluffy snow on top of what we had.  These tracks show how I was able (barely) to get out of our lane on Friday but by Saturday morning drifting discouraged me from trying again.

This seems to be my classic snow picture now -- snow on the tractor.  The accumulation keeps building.

My grape vines and garden under a blanket of snow.  At least the garden will have a good start of moisture when all of this melts.  The prediction is for warmer temperatures next week to start the melting process, but also some freezing rain and snow on Monday.  At this time last year I was taking pictures of daffodils four inches out of the ground with big buds and was watching snow geese flying overhead.

I took this early on Saturday morning, so there is still frost on the remains of last year's grapes.

Here are the tracks of Friday's drive out now drifted on Saturday morning, though this wasn't the worst of it.  We had it plowed out by late afternoon on Saturday.

The sun shines through frosted trees.

I took a look at my bee hives though it was only about 30 degrees so too cold to open them up and look inside.  Here there are dead bees on the landing board of the weaker "north" hive, which in a way is encouraging as it indicates there are live bees carrying them out and leaving them there.  So, dead bees are actually signs of life.

Here is a dead bee (probably) on top of the snow a foot in front of that same hive.  Since we had another inch or so of fluffy stuff on Saturday (I took this today -- Sunday) this tells me that this bee and the other two dead bees I saw were flying in the last 24 hours.  Again, this is encouraging sign of life in the hive.

The stronger "south" hive had no dead bees in front or on the landing board, but I saw three live bees either walking around on the snow in front or climbing out of the top entrance.  This one was walking around in one of my footprints and seemed to be cleaning itself, then took off.  We have been having such a prolonged stretch of bitter cold weather that I was fearful that there would be no bees surviving, but these signs suggest that both hives still have survivors.

My bird feeders have been very busy with all of this snow cover, but are being actively raided by squirrels --here there are four fox squirrels on the two feeders enjoying my sunflower seeds.