Bee-yootiful!!

My beekeeping mentor Brian came over today to take a look at my hives and tell me what I was seeing in the Elizabeth hive that looked so strange to me. We did a quick check of both of them. The Victoria hive is looking fabulous! We saw more capped brood and plenty of new larvae and best of all, we saw Victoria herself. Once I saw her I couldn't believe how much bigger she was than when she first arrived. Her body has elongated quite a bit and she is easily the largest insect in the hive. Sweet. That was a big bonus today!

The Elizabeth hive looks wonderful after all. We saw plenty of regular capped brood pattern, plenty of larvae squirming in their cells, and lots of good bee activity. Brian said the larger cells I saw at the first were drone cells. I also think we saw some queen cups: tunnel-shaped cells pointing downward in the middle of the frame. I don't think there was anything in them. If they get to be capped queen cells, then we'll have to figure out what to do then. If anything. I read somewhere that sometimes the bees just build them for "in case."

As Brian says, with the wacky weather we've had this spring, and bees being bees, they will just do what they want regardless of (or in spite of) our "help."

We looked at a couple of his hives too, and he was relieved to find both of them had their queens. He had been thinking they were queenless (which is terrible news for a hive. New queens cost $25 each). We did see several capped queen cells, though, and he scraped them off. I brought them home to show my children, who thought that was really cool. They had larvae in them too.

As for my garden, I'm starting to get excited. My potatoes are poking through like crazy. I see new sprouts every day. I was starting to worry I had planted them too deeply. All of my "All Blues" potatoes sprouted. I think I saw some cucumbers and regular green beans too. And I'm really excited to see several yard-long green bean sprouts poking through. They're one of my experiments this year.

The chickens seem very happy as well. Their voices have changed from sweet peeping to more of a grown-up chicken croaking squawk. They seem to like their large chicken yard too. It needs some additional support, and very likely some kind of a screen over the top that I can remove, but that's an engineering project for another day. Oh, and I learned why our other chickens were fouling their nesting boxes. It's because chickens will roost at night on the highest perch they can get to, which in our case happened to be the top sides of the nesting boxes. I need to figure out how to cover the top to keep them from continuing the bad habit. Hmmm. Maybe a pair of plastic bins put upside down over the top...

Oh!! The best news today is that there are peaches on my peach trees!! They didn't all get killed off in the April/May snows we got. To tell you how weird this weather has been: my tulips are still blooming today, June 1. And my peonies haven't opened yet. The iris are just starting bloom. That's about 10 days late for our area.

There's plenty to bee hopeful about!!