New Phoebe Brood

We've been having fun watching the second brood of chicks from our Eastern Phoebe family. Here are some pictures of the poor hungry chicks. When their little heads peek up over the nest they look like babies with bad hair days. In a couple of weeks they'll be flying away like their earlier brothers/sisters did.

Our Second Swarm

We had another swarm this past week. However, it was not as exciting as the first. This swarm split off one of our own hives, and there were less than one-fourth the number of bees that were in the earlier swarm.

I was sitting in my office, glanced out the window, and saw a small tornado of bees gathering in an oak tree in the front yard.

Unfortunately, we had no more spare beehive parts. We had to borrow a super from our daughter and son-in-law. I emailed a couple of the members of our beekeeping club, and one of them had a top and bottom board I could borrow for the super.

This one was more complicated, as the bees had swarmed around a limb too high for us to reach, even with our ladder. This necessitated me climbing the ladder, climbing up on a lower limb, and using the electric alligator loppers to detach two limbs from the tree - the first limb I cut down was between the limb the trees were on and the ground.

Trying to saw off the limb the bees were on, I managed to get the alligator loppers stuck. After much twisting, pushing, pulling, and shoving, I finally freed the loppers. However, the limb was not completely severed.

Back down on the ground, we tried using a rope to pull the limb from the trunk of the tree - to no avail. We then tried twisting the branch for a while - again, no luck. Finally, I climbed back up the ladder with the loppers, and cut further from the trunk and the limb finally fell on top of the super.

We gently grabbed handfuls of bees off the limb and dropped them into the super. We finally got the queen into the super and the rest of the bees followed her in.

Early that same evening, we rearranged the two existing hives so we had a hive body on which to place the super. We then placed the top and bottom boards on the super, and carried it to our "apiary".

Knowing that the bees needed some quick energy so they could begin drawing out comb on the frames inside the hive body and super, we made some sugar water, placed it in the quart jar and placed it in the feeder.

That turned out to be a mistake.

Over the next few days, the bees from the "new" hive and the old hive next to it became very agitated. It finally became apparent that the old bees were flying from their hive to the new hive and robbing the feeder of sugar water. We did not see the bees actually fighting the first couple of days, but we stopped filling the feeder with the sugar water. Yesterday, I took a look, and saw two bees from the new hive dragging one of the old bees down the side of the hive, making all kinds of racket as they duked it out.

When we get the new pieces we ordered, we will take a closer look and see what is left. Buzzing can be heard from all three hives, so it may turn out okay in spite of our mistake.

Tornadoes

I just realized I mentioned an April tornado in the last post, but have never posted the story.

The story begins Wednesday, April 9, 2008.

It started out with almost continuous lightning and raucous thunder. The sky was lit up with the lightning almost as bright as sunlight. The thunder, lightning, and rain continued almost non-stop. At some point during the night, I was awakened by a bright flash of lightning, a loud thunderclap, and what souned like a tree being hit by lightning. I did not have my rain guage out, so I had no idea how much rain we got overnight. It sure sounded like plenty. We lost power sometime during the night.

The power came on again around 2am Thursday. It was still on when we woke up at 6am.

Around 6:30am, Colleen was sitting in the living room putting her shoes on. Suddenly things got very, very dark, windy, and torrential rains come down. The power went out immediately. I was sure it was a tornado (we were under a tornado watch). The wind was beating relentlessly against the windows. It frightened us so much, we ran to the bathroom and hid there until it passed.

When we finally came out of the bathroom, we saw part of a pine tree lying next to the dining room window. It was continuing to rain, though nowhere as heavily as it had just been. We took a short walk outside to see what had happened. We saw that the pine tree had fallen in such a way that the outer top branches just brushed the dining room roof.

When the rain stopped and the sun came out, we started walking around our property to check out what happened. We saw six or seven more pine trees which had fallen behind our garden shed. Most of them fell against another large oak tree. One tree fell into a cedar tree just behind the garden shed and thus the shed was spared any damage. The front yard was littered with pine branches.

We then walked down the driveway that goes out the northernmost part of our property. We saw even more pine trees, and some oaks, that had fallen over from the roots, had snapped down near the bottom, or had been twisted off the trunk a few feet from the ground. During that walk we saw the remains of a pine tree which had been struck by lightning, charred from the top to the bottom, with a barber-pole like stripe down the tree where bark had come off when the lightning struck.

All in all, we counted two-dozen (at least) trees that had gone down during the storm. They were in such a straight-line pattern, it sure seemed like it was from a tornado.

Then we walked down to the "gentle" creek that flows across the road a little further north of our property. This creek, usually a few feet wide and either very dry or with a gentle flow, was now at least ten feet across with the water rushing in a mad torrent. That made me think we must have received several inches of water since the storm had started just a few hours earlier.

We also saw another pine tree which had fallen from our property across the dirt road at the east of our property effectively blocking any exit to civilization. There is another creek to the southeast of us that we found out was so bad that even the trucks from the electric company would not cross. Trees were down all up and down the road. In one spot the road was covered with water where there is not even a creek.

Later that afternoon, I discovered the pine tree that fell outside our dining room was not one but TWO pine trees.

Oh, yes, the electric company. The storm had snapped four power poles in half and it took them most of the day to replace them and get power back. The power came back at 8pm. It was the next day before we had telephone service.

This was more excitement than we could stand and we were exhausted.

Signs of Spring

The dogwood trees are now blooming, here in the Ozarks. The wild peach trees are in bloom and tiny leaves are starting to green up the landscape. A couple of tiny birds are trying to make a scraggly little nest on our front porch, even though we keep discouraging them. This week, we also spotted a bobcat, a wild turkey and a long black snake.

We have some vegetable seedlings ready to go into the garden. We bought a large supply of seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Hopefully, in a couple of weeks, we'll have the garden planted. It's going to be lots of fun.