Long Live The Queen!

I cracked open the hive today and was happy to see that the queen was nowhere to be seen.  Her little box had been nicely chewed open, and her royal jellyness was, hopefully, off being fruitful and multiplying.  They left a little sample of their mad wax skillz on her container.  Wow… my very first homemade beeswax… uh… booger.

Likewise, the mason bees appear to have fully emerged at this point.  Even better, they seem to be sticking around.  You can kind of see them hanging out in their tubes here waiting for the sun to shine a little more.  I’m hoping that they fill two blocks of 96 this season.  It shouldn’t be too tough given how many females seems to be flying around.  Theoretically, that’d give me around 1,000 cocoons.  I’d be bee RICH!

There’s lots of delicious flowers (such as these luscious-peaches-to-be on my Oregon Curl Free Peach) for the ladies to snack on.

Though, did you know… that a honeybee has a foraging range of 2-3 miles?  That’s 20ish square miles.  They probably don’t care much about my trees.

The mason bees likely stay a bit closer, but last I saw, they range hundreds of yards… so… you’re welcome ungrateful neighbors.

On the other hand, they can stumble around to the front and get their nasty selves all over the Autumn Rose Peach.

Here’s the scene in the farm.  Starting to look more like I garden, and less like I took the mobile home off her blocks to get deloused.

And inside the greenhouse… where AGAIN, I over-planted and/or under-euthanized.  It just seems a shame to toss one when there are two perfectly good seedlings in a flat cell.  Or three.  Or… six.  Still having a little problem with algae on the soil surface.  As long as I keep stirring the top of the problem pots, it doesn’t seem to suffocate the plants, but it’s a pain.  Anyway, got some beauties going in there… just need to get the temps up outside a bit, and they can invade the farm.