BEES!!

my annual supply of leaf cutter bees came by fedx today arriving about one-thirty this afternoon...i set the tube of cocoons in the refrigerator and used the fifteen minutes to set up the hatchery...i retrieved the tube, opened it, and poured some of the cocoons out in my hand...

there were some hatched out males in there, dopey from the cold...

one by one...

they began to warm up...

and take off to go be bees...

this guy was hanging around the hatchery and i had to move him along...

so that after i put the cocoons in the hatchery i could affix the lid...

he came back after it was on...

did some clambering while exploring...

and then just stared at me a while before he took off to have a look around the yard while he waited for the girls to hatch...my thoughts are he'll be back.

alfalfa

i have bees coming in a few months...alfalfa leaf cutter bees to be exact...a couple of hundred in cocoons ( as well as some that wil hatch out on the trip )...

and while the alfalfa i have in the yard is greening up i came to the conclusion i needed another stand ( it will be the third )...

so yesterday when i cleaned out the alflafa bed at the campus garden i saved some of the seed heads and brought them home...

when i got home from work today i crushed some of the dead flowers and sifted them...

just to be certain that seeds were actually produced...

then i went out back and dug up a patch by the back fence, well away from the other two stands...

and stripped the flowers and seeds off the stems onto the soil...there is a rain/snow mix going on right now so they will be well watered...and since they have been out in the cmapus garden all winter they will have been cold shocked and so dormancy should be broken...we will see how it goes in a week or two and, if it goes well, the bees will have a larger supply of nesting materials in the summer

divsion of labor

on the south side of the house there is a bed of jerusalem artichokes wirh maize planted along the permeter..i was just out there watching and...

the bumble bees were all over the jerusalem artichoke blooms...

while not two feet away the leaf cutters were busy working the cornflowers...and there was no cross-training on other blooms between them...prefernce? perhaps...although...

i have seen leaf cutters on jerusalem artichokes...

and bumble bees doing acrobatics on bittersweet nightshade blooms...certainly there were unoccupied bloons of both sorts...enought o go around and, curiously to my thinking...

no one was paying any attention tot he raft of maize and teosinte flowers out on the east side.

early july yard

my back yard received half an inch of rain yesterday...

and temperatures are "seasonable" so after i got home from work i had a look around the back yard...

the maize is robust and more than "knee high" as of the second day of the month ( so is most of the dense yellow #2 out in the industrial fields by the by )...

some of its "wild and weedy ancestor" teosinte is next to it...not quite as tall...it isn't domesticated and "improved"...still it is looking sturdy...

the asparagus is producing "berries"...

the rye is looking blonder and i can see individual grains...

there's still some green out there though so perhaps another week before harvest...

the surprise grape vine is doing well...

and is getting on with the busines of attaching itself to the fence rather than "native growth" attached to the fence...we are pleased...

finally, bee moms have been diligently gathering pollen and nesting materials, laying eggs, and plugging tubes...

natural craftswomen...

this weathered old bee house ( and please not this is a photo from four days ago i was remiss today ) has twenty-eight plugged tubes of bee larvae and i counted three in the newer bee house just now...the best season on record for bee house useage...i left them both out all winter and the weathering seems to have helped...perhaps the girls appreciate sabi.