It's funny we go through this little bit of warm weather every year, and every year I get way to excited and enjoy myself way way tooo much. We had a bout of really wet weather and our River spilled over the banks. Jim said this year we lost about 5 feet of property and some really beautiful trees.
Monday and Tuesday it was pure sunshine and warm weather. Monday it got up in the high sixties and Tuesday I put shorts on and worked outside in the yard with our puppy Abby. Ok she is a year old but she is a big moose and still acts like a puppy.
I was at the market Saturday and it was great to be back. While I was there, Jim went out and checked half of our bees to see how things were going and they were looking pretty darned good. Sunday we spent most of the day checking the rest of the hives so we would have a game plan about how many boxes of bees and queens to order for the spring. Of course we had some hives that were dead and we try to figure out what happened. We had honey left in all of the boxes so we know it wasn't because they starved. This year we cleaned the boxes up in the field before we brought them back in so it took us a little longer. One change we made to things this year was taking the extra honey out of the empty boxes and fed it to the hives that were left. We know we will have another cold spell, for heavens sake we live in Michigan so what we do is spread the wealth around so they are all taken care of. That pretty much eliminates the need to feed the girls sugar water to get them through the spring. On top of that we had boxes of un-spun honey supers at the end of the year last year and what we did was hold off, stored them and waited till now to bring them out. When Jim got home from work yesterday there was still a little bit of daylight left and he took the remaining frames of honey out to the local yard. The bees were bringing in a ton of pollen over the weekend, I'm going to post some pictures of what we found in the bee yard and a video as well.
Today it's suppose to rain so I've got some inside stuff to do. I got my herb seeds planted in the seed trays last night and all the lavender I planted last year is doing really well. Got some great ideas for infused honey that I'll be working on, stay posted for an update.
I was out of the market for awhile, my mom was ill but she is on the mend and I ended up getting my rotator cuff repaired so I'm in rehab still for a little while more. That just means it takes me twice as long to do anything. But I'm being careful.
Have a great day! Photo's to follow:)
