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.

Planting

No pictures today, but I did till up one section of my garden and got potatoes planted tonight.  It took me less than two hours to hook up the tiller, till the ground, cut up the seed potatoes and plant seven 12 foot rows of potatoes.  Daffodils are in full bloom and lilacs and tulips are getting close.  I need to take some pictures.  Grapes seem to have survived the winter well.  I heard my first whippoorwill tonight.  The bluebirds in my garden had five eggs in their nest when I checked last week.

Spring catching up

We were gone for the weekend but I think we had a lot of warm weather and sunshine, which seemed to give Spring a chance to make up for some lost time.  These daffodils were in full bloom on our return late Sunday.

Hyacinths were also now in full bloom in front of the house.

Magnolia blossoms were starting to open on our tree.

In the garden, rhubarb continued to grow vigorously.

The apricot tree was coming into bloom -- always the first fruit tree to bloom.  Even though the weather was cloudy, it was rather late, and a ran storm was approaching from the west a few bees were working these flowers.

Spring is starting to show

The purple crocus have now bloomed for a few days and I have seen honey bees visiting these flowers.  Many of the early flowering trees, like the maples, are also breaking buds.

These white and yellow crocus are also in bloom.  I have seen bees at these too, both honey bees and smaller native bees.

A clump of moss is greening up in the woods sending up little tendrils.  There is also another plant sprouting up -- the white sprout on the far right side of the moss--which I think is a may apple just emerging.

Buds on the plums are showing green as they swell and prepare to bloom -- still some weeks off I think.

Leaves of rhubarb are emerging from the ground and just starting to unfurl.

I did a more thorough check of my bee hives today.  This is the weaker hive with just a few bees on the top bars of the top box.  They hadn't touched the pollen patties.  I did not in the course of the inspection though that some bees were bringing in pollen from some source -- a tan colored pollen.

There were a lot of dead bees in this hive and quite a bit of honey left.  A lot of bees died on the comb, or with their heads stuck in comb, presumably dying of cold or starving when they were unable to move due to cold.  I think that an additional factor was the Nosema, a dysentery disease, that weakened the hive.  I was somewhat surprised to find any brood at all but there was just a small spot of brood on two frames.  This is one of them.

This is the other frame with a little brood.  I did see some larvae too, so it seems that there is still a queen surviving in the hive, though I didn't see her.  I thought perhaps this was a laying worker, but if that was the case this would be drone brood but it doesn't look like it is.  The queen has a long way to go to build up from this beginning -- I'm not sure if this hive is going to make it or will just dwindle away.

This is the screened bottom board on this hive, with the screen almost completely covered with dead bees.  I tried to brush all of the dead bees off of the frames, and also brushed these bees off of the bottom board.  A lot of the bees died while stuck in the comb so I could not get those out on this quick inspection.

This is the other stronger hive.  I made the mistake of not properly replacing the cover on the hive covering the hive top feeder the other day, so bees had gotten into the feeder.  Luckily it was almost empty at the time so not too many bees drowned, but there were a lot of bees in this box with the feeder where there should not have been.

This is the inner cover that was on top of the hive top feeder.  It is covered with bees as well.  I shook and brushed all of the bees off of the feeder and the inner cover when I filled the feeder with more sugar water and replaced it, but a few bees were persistent enough to get back into this box and will surely drown in the sugar water.

This is how the brood pattern looked in the healthier hive -- with lots of brood and lots of bees.  I think that six of the ten frames in the top box were covered in bees and capped brood.  I saw lots of larvae too.

Another one of these frames showing lots of brood and bees.  This hive had consumed almost all of the protein patty that I had placed on top so I put another one.  Some bees were bringing in pollen but I didn't think there was enough available to feed all of the brood and the new bees.

One more frame with lots of bees and capped brood.  This hive is doing very well.  I found that all of the brood though was in the top of the three boxes, so I re-arranged the hive so that the brood box went on to the bottom to give the queen room to move upward as is their natural approach.

I encountered only a few dead bees in the first two boxes, but found this pile of dead bees on the top bar of the bottom box.  There were also white crystals scattered thoughout the hive which I believe is the remnant of the sugar block that I fed them over the winter.  As almost all of the honey was gone from this hive, they definitely needed the sugar bloc and had consumed all of it.

This is the bottom board of this hive which was also covered in dead bees, which I swept off.  I hope that all of the sugar coated bees don't attract the wrong kind of vermin that will disturb the hive.

I also checked the bluebird house in the garden today and found that they had constructed a nest that looks about finished -- no eggs yet though.  I had been checking it before and as of a week or two ago it had been completely empty.