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.

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.