Once again we’re under a tornado watch, but the danger is a lot less than a month ago.  We should be out from under the thunderstorms by this afternoon.  Meanwhile, I’m sitting here looking at the rivulets running along the side of the drive and at our beautiful grassy area going across to the well house.  The White Dutch Clover is well enough established to bloom in many places.   Of our 20 acres, we probably have 15 covered with blackberry bushes in full bloom right now.   There is a lot of crimson clover in the orchard.   Everything is really beautiful, but there’s not a bee to be seen on all the things we’ve planted for them.  (Not that we planted the thorny blackberry vines, but we will always leave some patches as a nectar source.)    The bees are clearly finding plenty of resources elsewhere as all hives have multiple frames full of nectar and the bees are drawing lots of beautiful new comb.   As always, we have to recognize that the bees know what the hive needs at this point in time, and they will gather what they want.   We see lots of bees returning from the direction of the creek, so they are either heading toward the deciduous trees or going across the creek to the forest land that was cleared 18 months ago.

I checked most of the hives over spring break — the first week of April.   We are applying ProDFM for the first time this year and seeing good results.   Of course, it’s always difficult to determine whether or not the bees would have done as well without our intervention, but treated hives appear to be thriving better than those we did not treat.   Some of our hives had bees on about half the frames 10 days ago and are now bursting at the seams.  A few hives have open brood and eggs covering four or more frames.

I checked hives that I didn’t get to over break yesterday and pulled out frames with eggs and 1 – 3 day brood and Hubby started our second grafting attempt.  That turned out to be a very efficient way to do that, and after harvesting, we placed those frames into NUCs for walkaways.   That also enabled us to add empty frames to high producing hives.  We didn’t see any swarm cells in those hives yet, but the hives are producing lots of drones, so we need to do what we can to discourage swarm tendencies.

We had 75% success the first time we attempted grafting, but work and weather got in the way of us checking the grafts in a timely manner and the queens hatched and left!   I saw one small queen in the hive that same week, but she must have lost her way on a mating flight.   This time we have NUCs set up to receive any good queen cells.    We split two angry hives into NUCs and only grafted from mellow and productive hives.  If the NUCs build their own queen cells over the next few days, we’ll pinch those off and give them a queen that is more likely to be one we can work with.    (Hubby ended up having to taking shelter under the garden sprinkler to deter some bees that need an attitude adjustment yesterday!)

Our hive beetle problem-corner remains an issue despite a variety of things we’ve tried.   I moved one 10-frame to a NUC over break and that NUC had almost no bees yesterday and a sickening number of SHM larvae wiggling away on the frames.  Hubby is now moving healthy bees from the lower apiary to our sunnier upper apiary, but he’s not moving hives up from that one corner.    We will move them to other benches in the lower apiary and treat them, but we don’t want to risk infesting what is currently a good location.   We have had some luck with putting old carpet under one of hive stands in the lower apiary and we’ll use up old carpet that we brought from the house under our new hive stands.   Cheap landscape fabric, Diatomaceous Earth,  and a variety of SHB traps did nothing for the corner closest to the spring although all of those methods helped elsewhere.   We have better landscape fabric under all hive stands in the upper apiary, and we think that is helping.

Talking about landscape fabric, Hubby has built two raised beds so far and we are using heavy landscape fabric on those as well as on the new blueberry and boysenberry patch.   Four varieties of heirloom tomatoes are thriving in the first raised bed and Lemon Cucumber seedlings are ready to be moved into the second one.   The older we get, the less we want to bend down to weed any kind of garden, so raised beds are the way to go!  With rainfall like we just had, they are also a good way to keep soil amendments where we need them instead of seeing them wash down to the creek!   Hubby stacked the blocks without using any mortar to enable us move the beds if they don’t work well in their current location and to allow excess water to escape.   Hubby is going to build a smaller bed for asparagus and everything else will have to live in old Home Depot buckets this year! We’ve gone from gardening in the sandy soil of Columbia, SC to gardening in clay.   I must say that almost all of our transplants are doing far better here than they ever did at the old house.

There’s lots of “Hubby did this” and “Hubby is going to do this” in this post, but that’s not because I’ve become a lady of luxury.   I’m a very frustrated bee-keeper dealing with tendonitis in my right ankle/calf!   I made a lot of progress over spring break, but walking around the classroom last week set me back again.  Still,  my ankle looks and feels a whole lot better than a month ago, and I know from past experiences that being patient now provide a better outcome by summer.   Not that I’m really being patient — I guess being proactive would be a better term.   When have I ever been patient?

The storms have passed and the rain has stopped, so it’s time for me to take a trip around the farm in the golf cart before settling down to grade essays and write lesson plans.   Hubby has also cooked something that smells delicious, so eating is probably my first priority.   We have come through another storm front without damage and bees, trees, and vegetables are all doing well.   Life is good on the farm.