Birds at the bird feeder

It has remained bitterly cold through the middle part of February this year with a few dustings of snow.  Its been too cold for any beehive activity, but my bird feeder has been very busy. Here a male cardinal picks up seeds dropped from the feeder.  A female purple finch is in front of him.

Here he shares his profile.

A female cardinal sits in a young dogwood tree near the base of the feeder.

A goldfinch in his winter plumage sits on the dogwood waiting for his turn at the feeder.

A flock of goldfinches works the ground under the feeders with a few juncos mixed in.  At times, the feeders seemed mobbed with these little finches with more than 50 at a time.

A male purple finch sits in the dogwood.

Another male purple finch sits on the feeder, with a female behind him.

A downy woodpecker checks out some suet on the end of the feeder.

A little warm-up

The temperature warmed up to 50 this weekend which allowed the snow to melt quite a bit and made our lane a slushy mess.  Saturday and Sunday have been very sunny and feeling almost Spring-like.

I took the opportunity to check my bees.  It was too cold still to open the hives but all three hives were active with lots of bees making orientation and cleansing flights.  All three hives seemed to be equally active.  Here are bees hovering in front of the two south-most hives, using both bottom and top entrances.

The bees seemed to somewhat prefer the top entrance on these two hives, though.  Here are bees at the top entrance of the south hive.

Here are bees at the top entrances of both hives.  I am anxious to get a chance to see how much sugar they have taken but need temperatures over 60 to safely take a peek, I think.

These are bees at the bottom entrance of the south hive, with a lot of them hovering in the air in front.  Bees were flying all around the area, with very few dead bees observed.  They seem pretty healthy from what little I can see of them from the outside of the hive.

Here is the bottom entrance of the middle hive, also showing lots of activity.

The north hive was also as active as the others but all of the activity was at the bottom entrance.  The bees in that have don't seem to have found the top entrance yet, or perhaps had enough honey stores that they didn't need to push their way up through the sugar box to get to the top entrance.  I look forward to an opportunity to look into the top of that hive to see if they are on the sugar.

A Heavy Wet Snow

We finally had a significant snow fall overnight last night.  I measured about 7 inches in our lane.  Here is the snow looking toward the garden gate.

It was a wet heavy snow that stuck to the trees.  Here the snow lingers on some of my fruit trees.  The temperature rose a little above freezing so the snow was starting to drop off of the trees by the time I took these pictures.

Here is snow among my grape vines.

This is a view of the west end of the garden with snow stacked on top of the posts holding the wires for my grape trellises.

Outside the west garden fence, the snow covers the field and the trees in the forest beyond.

The trees in the forest were quite pretty this morning with the snow on each branch.

Our lane going west covered with snow.

This is the path going back to my bee hives next to the pond.

The hives are covered in snow but protected from the west and north winds by bales of straw.  All of the hives are wrapped in roofing felt to give them further insulation from wind.  They have top entrances so I did not bother to clear the snow that was blocking the bottom entrances.

Looking from the other side.  Obviously, it was too cold for any activity today.  The bees were all snug in their clusters deep in the hives.

The bales do not rest right up against the hives.  I left a gap of about a foot.
The bales are held up with steel fence posts driven into the ground to keep them from toppling over onto the hives.

The bird feeder in my back yard was busy today, though I didn't catch any birds in this picture.  A new addition is the black baffle that, so far, has been successful in keeping squirrels and raccoons from raiding the feeders.  I find that the seed now lasts much longer.  The squirrels have been quite determined to find a way onto the feeders, climbing around on the screens on the windows of the house and attempting to jump off of the porch roof to reach the feeders.  However, they have had no success to date.