Garden

It was a rainy weekend, but toward the end we got a little sun. That was enough. I have been dismayed that I haven’t gotten any of our spring planting done. We have stuff to plant now, but I just haven’t had the chance to get it into the dirt. So when the sun peeked out, I grabbed my gloves and trowel and headed for the little raised bed garden. I planted two small rows of beets , two rows of radishes, a few red onions, and six small lettuce plants. I still have lettuce and spinach seeds to sew and more onion sets to plant as well as a few broccoli and brussel sprout plants.

It’s not much, but at least it’s a start. I still need to rig up the pea trellis.

Bees

The other exciting news is that I did a quick inspection of my two older hives to see how full the upper boxes were. Assuming that there was still room, I would feed again and decide when to put on the honey supers (the boxes on top of the brood boxes used exclusively to store honey). What I found was that the top brood boxes were almost completely full. I only pulled out the outer frame and found comb half filled with nectar even on the outside of the frame, which is typically the last place the bees go looking for space. So I quickly ran to grab the supers and queen excluders to install them.

My fear is that I am too late. I understand that if the workers have already decided that it is too crowded and have started the process of raising a new queen in preparation for supersedure, then there is no stopping it and they will swarm. I might want to check the bottom box for queen cells in a week or so, to find out. If queen cells are present (perhaps 5 to 10 of them), then they will almost certainly swarm and my only recourse is to watch for it and try to capture the swarm and reinstall them into another hive. I’m not really prepared for that. I would need to prepare a new box and some frames. I really hope they don’t swarm, because I could easily miss then and lose half my bees. Even if I were to capture them, I would have two hives at ‘half power’ and might not get much honey from the old one (and none from the new one).

So I will hope they don’t swarm and that the weather stays nice and that there are adequate nectar sources now. If all that happens, then they will start to build comb in the honey supers and then store nectar and make honey. Can you tell I am excited.