It’s been a crazy time up in my Beethedral this spring. We’ve had very wet weather ever since March, and I hoped that the bees would want to begin swarming from my four over-wintered hives as soon as they got a sunny day. Well, they did. It’s been swarm city here at MillHaven for the…
Spring in the bee yard: Is there any better time of year? Here in the Pacific Northwest, we had a loooong winter with much dreariness, but only a couple events of cold, ice, and snow. Last autumn, I found myself with four thriving hives: Three in straw, and one in my last top bar hive….
My back lawn is very sad. Most of its lovely green face is beneath mud now, and in other places the grass is drowned beneath rain puddles. This has been a very wet season, a record-rain season I’m told. Carter dropped sheets of old plywood across the yard so we could walk without having our…
It doesn’t look like much at all, really. Just a big jumble of bright green, floating like a platter on my bucket pond. But it is precious to me, the very heart of one of my first annual rites of spring. This is my fourth year of this ritual that first began when I kept…
It started with the peeper frogs. Theirs was the first song of spring I heard this year. Many people complain about the “noise” of the peepers, and I am sorry for them, that they are not able to allow this high, pure, angelic chorus to melt their hearts after a long winter freeze. I have…