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 Picture Book pick: WILD HONEY BEES by Ingo Arndt and Jurgen Tautz. Dive into the biodiversity of a healthy forest hive. The images are absolutely breath-taking. For beekeepers and beepeekers alike. Scientific Inquiry: If you ever wondered about the honeybee "dance language" hypothesis, you need to read this wonderfully readable and thoroughly researched book.
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Mid-summer notes: We've got chickadees nesting in our nest box. Chickadees only have one brood per year, so a second family made use of our bird box :^) They have been keeping their parents busy and we have enjoyed the peeping. Our garden thrived throughout our cool wet spring and we've been enjoying daily salad greens with lettuces, arugula, sorrel, kale, and chard. We are planting seeds and starts this week for our fall salad munching.   Our wild backyard featured volunteer poppies, borage, and glorious 10' tall foxgloves this year. Loving the lavender...mmmmmmm   bird & bee from Katie Daisy's With Love, Adventure, and Wildflowers Notes  I have had this quote pinned to my bulletin board for over 20 years...and it has never seemed truer.
To feed or not to feed? That is the question... our bees were flying on a sunny day in the first week of February; I opened our Sweinty hive and looked through the handy acrylic cover and saw that it looked like our bees had made it through the winter and they appeared to be strong and active. The trouble is--how to keep them that way through our wet and cold Seattle spring weather? This year I decided to try the dry sugar feeding method and followed Michael Bush's advice. On Feb 8, I placed newspaper on top of the frames and covered it with dry white sugar. The moisture from the hive quickly saturated the sugar and the bees began to use it.  Twenty days later, on February 26, most of the sugar had disappeared=another dose of dry sugar.  Twelve days later, on March 9 the bees had moved all the sugar! Another cup of sugar...  Just one week later, March 15, that sugar was gone--today I replaced the newspaper and gave them another large dose. Michael Bush says that they'll use it if they need it, otherwise ignore it.
In addition to the sugar, the bees are bringing in boatloads of pollen which means that they are busy making bee bread and feeding the new bees. We have seen several sunny morning orientation flights, so that's promising.  Today’s date, 22/02/2022, is a palindrome date replete with “twos” and happens to fall on a Tuesday. This perfect alignment will not occur again for another 400 years!
Well, that's something.  Midwinter finds Seattle cold, dark, and wet...but with lovely chilly sunshine breaks in the weather that draw us outside; we've been meeting up with a gorgeous barred owl in the arboretum and our neighborhood Cooper's Hawk has been gracing our backyard often these last few days.  Missing the snow, but we are keeping our spirits bright with saunas, candlelight, and eggnog! Sláinte friends~    Crow, Cooper's hawk, and Stellar Jay feathers, left for me near our bird baths :^)  Party animals-my favorite coffee cup by Vicki Sawyer
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AuthorTracey Byrne~ 
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