Spring in full swing

Spring seems to be aggressively establishing itself now.  Here are red bud and wild plum trees blooming along our back yard fence.  Leaves are just starting to come out on some of the trees.

Spring beauties are blooming all over the forest floor in the woods on either side of our yard.

The dutchman's britches are just about finished blooming but I did find this one blooming in the woods near the garden fence.

Trillium is up and budding as well.

Wild phlox blooming in the woods north of the garden.

 Mayapples are up and unfurling thier leaves above left.  Little oak leaves just opening on a sapling in the woods.  It won't be long before I am hunting for mushrooms.

The tulips are blooming that I planted behind the garden fence to keep the deer from eating them up.

Daffodils blooming under the maple tree in our front yard.  The daffodils seem particularly full of blooms this year.

This clump of different kinds of daffodils is up and blooming along the east garden fence.

More of these daffodils with the sun behind them.

I also got a chance to check my bees again this weekend.  This is the small amount of brood that there is in the weak hive.  Last week I hadn't seen any uncapped brood and no queen so I thought this hive was queenless and was thinking about giving it some eggs from the other hive.  However, this weekend I did see some uncapped brood and the queen is in this picture -- the bee with the long abdomen in the middle near the top of the cluster.  She's laying but not a lot.  I wonder if the small size of the hive and limited availability of nurse bees is slowing her down.  I may, as an experiment, give this hive a frame of capped brood and nurse bees from the other hive to see if this encourages this queen to lay more eggs.

The stronger hive is still doing well.  I went into this hive hoping to see that the brood next had expanded into the top (third) box on the hive, and this frame shows that has in fact happened. I found both uncapped and this capped brood in the top box.

Here is a frame I like to see it -- covered with active busy bees.  I think there was uncapped brood under this mass of bees as well as some pollen.

Here's a frame full of capped brood from the middle of the second box further showing that this hive is booming.  Pollen is seen around the edges of the brood.

This frame from the second box shows brood surrounded by lots of colorful pollen.  Some of the pollen was brilliant red, as well as the orange, yellow and tan colors that you can see here.  There is also a few cells of uncapped brood visible here and some drone cells along hte top of the frame.

I saw a few queen cups but no queen cells that seemed to have active larva in them.  The cell protruding from the bottom of the frame here is a queen cup.  This one had some nectar in the bottom of it that makes me suspicious that there may be an egg in there.  I have never been able to spot the tiny eggs.  On a warm day earlier this week, I had stopped by the hive and seen a large number of bees congregated on the front of the hive and flying in front of it.  I feared they may be preparing to swarm, but I don't think that they did -- there were lots of bees in the hive this weekend and there were no queen sells fully formed on the bottom of the frames as I would expect if the hive had already swarmed.  I hope to split this hive in a week or two.

Here's a frame from the bottom box that shows there is active brood in the bottom box as well, with pollen and nectar around the edges.  This hive seems to be thriving.

The pear trees are just beginning to bloom.  One of the trees is loaded with blooms but the other only has a few.  Since these trees have to cross-pollinate to produce fruit, I'm not sure if I'll get much this year.

Apple blossoms are also starting to open, these on my Enterprise apple tree.  I had thought that my peach trees were completely without blossoms but I did see several blossoms on them today, later than usual for peach blossoms to open.  I've heard that the unusually cold winter will have made it difficult to get a peach harvest this year.

My grape vines seem to have survived the cold winter well.  Here buds are breaking on my Marquette vines.

Buds are also breaking on my Concord grape vines seen here.

My asparagus bed has been sending up some shoots and I have broken off a few to collect in the refrigerator for a meal soon.  There are lots more coming on.  I will need to check it daily probably.

I got my potato bed tilled with my tractor on Friday and got it all planted in the foreground here.

I spent some of the weekend clearing and tilling all of my garden beds and finished with the last ones this morning, but for we got some thunder and gentle rains shortly after lunch today.  I managed to get peas planted before rain hit.

The bluebirds have a nest in the box along my garden fence and I took a picture of the eggs in the next on Saturday.  There seemed to be a lot of coming and going from the nest while I was working in the garden today (Sunday) so I wonder if these eggs have hatched into hungry mouths to feed.