Bees flying over weekend

The temperature got up close to 60 degrees on Saturday 11/21 after some unusually cold weather in the previous week or so.  The bees were flying in front of all the hives.  I took this later in the day, but when I stopped by around noon there were a lot more bees flying in front of all of the hives in orientation flights.  When I took this picture the bees on the hive on the right seem to have stopped and there weren't as many flying at the two hives on the left.

This is a close up of the two hives on the left, showing the bees flying and gathered in front of the hive.  The bees clearly don't have any trouble navigating through the mouse guards I have installed on the entrances.

First signs of Winter

We received the first dusting of snow overnight -- the first signs of Winter.  The garden has been killed off by frost for several weeks and I have been working on getting the bees closed up for the Winter.

It was a light snow without wind so that what little snow that we had dusted the trees and branches in the neighboring woods.

The trees and road just North of my garden.

The corn has been harvested for quite some time and produced a very good yield this year.  The corn field has been disced to cut up the leftover trash.

The blackberries in my garden still have their leaves that caught the snow.

Here are the sad weedy remains of my vegetable garden.  This was a poor year for the garden because we were gone so much in the critical part of the summer that I completely failed to keep up with the weeds.

I only got half of the tomatoes in cages and the corn plot is behind that, both full of weeds, and all dead at this point.  There's always next year.

One bright spot in the garden were the strawberries that seemed to spread and push out most of the weeds on their own.  I did manage to get straw put on the strawberries yesterday to give them some protection over the winter.  I should have a good crop next Spring.

Here a large pumpkin remains n the garden.  There were several smaller ones too, all of them with a mouse-sized hole gnawed in them to get at the seeds.

My Norton grape vines show the remains of the grapes they produced this year and look rather dead with the snow on them, but I am sure that they will come back vigorously in the Spring.  The Japanese beetles damaged by grapes rather badly this year, though the Nortons and Concords less than the rest.

The path to my bees grew up quite a bit this year, and has some snow on the bare dirt of the path.

My bees are all set for the Winter, with mouse guards on the entrance to keep mice out of the hives, a candy board with 16 pounds of sugar for each of the big hives, 8 pounds for the small one and a "quilt box" which is a box with cedar shavings on top of the hive for insulation and to help absorb moisture.  I think that they all went in to the Winter with good numbers and stores, except the small hive which I really don't expect to make it.

I have straw bales around the west and north sides to block the worst of the Winter winds.

Looking down in the creek bed in the woods.

The creek bed in the other direction.

A deer decided to bed down just on the other side of our back yard fence.  Deer season starts next weekend.