winding down

ran into a depressing sight when i visited the bee houses this morning...the unmistakeable sign the mason bee season is slowing...two dead girls...

there are still busy girls out there...only fewer...and they seem to be in a hurry...working even harder...time is short and dna is relentless in its demand to be reproduced...it needs to carry on in a new generation...soon it will be time to take the houses down...put them in parasite proof mesh bags...and store them away in the shed until next march when i hang them out again for another cycle...

the end of the season is always a letdown...no more buzz...still...we had a pretty good season...last count was over three hundred sealed tubes and when i do the final inventory in a few days i am wagering there will be more...the last couple of leaf cutter seasons have been disasters...stillborn...none of them hatched last year and not many the year before that...hoping they take after the masons come june.

mason bees

since the thirtieth of last month...

the bee houses i put out the third week of march...

have become increasingly active...

as a new generation of bees...

hatches out...

to keep the relentless dna...

passing along.

mother's day out back

with seventeen trees in my back yard and five in the front areas of full sun are at a premium and confined to the south side of the yard and house...since part of that is a driveway i have taken to growing what needs full sun in containers...

so i purchased a couple of twenty gallon totes, which were cheap since they did not have lids...shipping and/or ordering error one supposes...drilled drainage holes in the bottoms and covered them with a thin layer of garden soil...

i had cut some red nordland seed potatoes yesterday to allow them to callous...i put them in one container and covered them with more garden soil...

i did the same with some russian banana fingerling potatoes which i did not cut and callous...

and i gave them a shot of water with marigold's help...i will move them into the sun and as they break surface bury them again until they reach the top of the containers...and we will see how well this works ( or not )...

elsewhere around the yard, mason bees are just waking up and getting to work...so far they have filled seventy-five tbes in two bee houses with larvae...the next generation is well under way...

the asparagus continues to produce new spears which i am harvesting although i have left a few to "fern" early to feed the roots...

the ramps on the north side of the house are doing well...hoping for bunching and for flowers both...

the mooseberry bush ( aka high bush cranberry for those of you berift of the bullwinkle j. mooose reference ) is blooming...

the strawberries are blooming as well and beginning to bear fruit...

a dense stand of jerusalem artichokes in one corner of a bed will need close monitoring or they will take over...

the first chinese yam vine of the year has popped up...there will be more...another colonizer...

and, finally, the potato that had been under the lights in the basement has been outside for going on a week...it has clearly shocked and is expressing its ambivalence about the environment it finds itself in...i can relate...more as it comes up.

mason bees

it is a sunny saturday here with temperatures near sixty degrees ( fahrenheit )...flowers are blooming and today i have seen spring bees taking advantage of the opportunity to begin moving their dna to a new generation...

they are fast and somewhat skittish...i do believe that simply my presence disturbs them...and having marigold nosing around pondering what one might taste like doesn't help getting a decent photo ( actually marigold is part of the reason there are mason bees around...as the name implies the bees use clayey soil in their nesting process and marigold, being the terrier she is, opens up a trench in the back yard with little real effort providing ample nesting material )...

the bees are certainly interested in the daffodils and i have noticed them on the crocuses as well...spring has arrived in a number of ways...

aside from the blooms they are showing marked interest in the bee houses around the yard as well...there is an ample supply of them for the mason bees and for the leaf cutters i hope to see later in the summer...so there should be some photos of nesting as spring progresses...we will keep an eye out for those.

bee houses

because the dog ( marigold by name ) is a terrier and is inclined to open up construction-grade excavations in the back yard, mason bees had ample raw material to work with out there in nesting terms last spring...

and so they began to utilize the bee houses i had hung up around the yard...

after the bees' season ended i took them down and stored them in predator-proof bags in the tool shed for the winter...

spring, and mason bee season, is nearly here and since i cout twenty six tubes of mason bee larva waiting to hatch i concluded it was time to bring them out and hang them back up so they don't hatch out in the tool shed...

the soil is thawing...new excavtions are opening up...the yard is ready...all we need are the daffodils and the bees.