Mid-August -- Garden harvest under way

We have started harvesting from the garden in a big way.  I harvested about 18 peppers a week ago and then went out on Friday and brought in a large basket full of produce --zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers.  These are some of the cherry tomatoes that we have coming on -- I picked a bowl full of these on Friday and picked my first batch of full size tomatoes.

Some of my pole beans are about ready to pick.

This is one of the big purple blossoms on my eggplants.  The plants have gotten quite large and there are a few small fruit on them.

My gourds are starting to produce a lot of fruit under the mass of big leaves.  It is a bit hard to find them at this point, but here are a couple that were visible through the leaves.

And here are a few of my full size tomatoes, in varying stages of maturity.  The tomato plants are very bushy and its a big hard to find the ripe fruit underneath.

The Norton grapes are starting to turn red and purple and ripen up.

The Concord grapes are also ripening.

The bees are also doing well.  This is the second frame of the first honey super on my weaker hive.  There isn't much wax on this frame but there are a lot of bees at work.  They seem to be working on bringing their numbers back up after being queenless for almost all of July.

This is a frame from the other side of the box showing a lot of bees on a fairly bare frame.  You can see a lot of bees in the box too.  The bees were calm during my short inspection today so the new queen doesn't seem to have brood that is any more aggressive than the original queen.

Here is a frame from the weaker hive--second frame in the first honey super, I think, that shows about 2/3 of the frame with capped honey.

This is the outside frame of the top brood box that is completely full of capped honey.

This is the third frame of the brood box almost full of capped hone, with some uncapped honey at the bottom of the frame (right side in the picture).

This is the middle frame of the top brood box that has a little capped brood and a lot of uncapped brood.  It is hard to see at this size, but almost all of the comb that appears empty here has larva of varying sizes when I enlarged the picture to look.  I didn't look any deeper than the top brood box so as not to disturb the hive any more, but confirmed here that I still have a strong new queen in this hive.

I opened the South healthier hive just to see how they were doing with filling the top (sixth) box with honey.  This frame from the middle of the box is nearly full of honey though its not capped yet.

I took this picture on Saturday morning looking out my front door.  This doe and twin fawns were feeding in the front yard in front of the garden.  The fawns are getting bigger but still have their spots.