Autumn update

Well, Autumn is upon us and the leaves on our sumac tree have to changed rich shades of yellow, red and orange, but most other trees are still looking green. The blueberries are also showing autumnal hues. Now we have bees I'm pleased that we have sources of nectar and pollen in the garden at this time of year. The bees were all over the sedum earlier and last weekend they were still covering the ivy.

As far as we can tell the bees are doing well. The first hive is very strong and well provided for. We acquired the second hive later in the season so this is not as big, but has still multiplied well and has a reasonable amount of stores.

The tomatoes are slowly ripening, especially the cherry variety. This is the first year I've not had any signs of blight, but they are in pots on the front doorstep, which is sheltered and catches the sun when it is present.

Our runner beans are over now. We have quite a few small potatoes left as well as some garlic and I'm working my way through a Sainsbury's tub full of apples from our apple tree. We've had some pies and crumbles and I've stewed some up for the freezer. I also took my mum a bag full when I visited her last week.

On a less positive note, we lost Amber yesterday, but she must have been about 4 years old as we have had her since February 2009. She was getting a bit stiff in the last few weeks and we wondered if she was succumbing to Marek's disease like the other two who arrived with her, but she didn't seem to have any of the other symptoms.

Smokie is giving us an egg most days as is Fudge, but Fudge's eggs usually have very thin shells, in spite of adding extra oyster shell to their feed and giving them copious dried meal worms. In the last week Amber hasn't been at Fudge's eggs before we could get to them, so we've cracked them straight away and put them in a pot in the fridge for omelets. 

While We Turned Our Backs

A few days after my last post for 'Notes on a Garden' we went on holiday to the Ionian island of Kefalonia (Kefallinia).

They had luscious grapes growing everywhere.

Courgettes, aubergines and tomatoes were also growing well in many gardens.

Unfortunately when we got home we found our own garden was not doing so well.

The cabbages weren't doing too badly, although the slugs and snails were obviously attacking some of them.

The new strawberry plants are looking good, if somewhat overgrown. A good session of weeding will put that right, when I've got some energy. Mind you, we want to leave some flowers for the bees.

Our first hive of bees seem to be doing well, although we acquired them too late in the season to expect any honey this year. Due to the bad weather most of the summer we are feeding them sugar solution.

Thursday before last we acquired a second, smaller colony known as a nuc(leus).

Our legumes, however, are not thriving. The peas are past it, between the slugs and the warm, dry weather back home during the second week of our holiday.

The French beans were clinging on to life, but the slugs and snails have removed all their leaves now in spite of another application of slug pellets.

We still have a few runner bean plants left, which are producing beans, 3 of at least 7.

Mystery Bee

I took the above photo on 26th April and have been trying to find out what it is. I've finally had it identified, thanks to Twitter, by Ian Beavis, Natural History specialist Entomologist ‏from Tunbridge Wells Museum & Art Gallery, a follower of Brigit Strawbridge, who is pretty passionate about bees.

I am told that it is a female Anthophora plumipes, which wikipedia tells me is the Hairy-Footed Flower Bee. You'll see from the picture to the right of the article that the males have quite different colouring.

The internet certainly can be very useful at times.

First Bee Inspection

As we'd had our bees a week it was time to inspect them on Saturday.  You can wait nine days, but this isn't convenient for most people.

We waited until early evening so most of the bees were home and less active. There wasn't much activity around the crown board.

There were plenty of bees on top of the bottom brood box.

It seemed a good idea to give one or two puffs of smoke so we didn't squash any bees or get stung if one got in our way.

The smoke soon did the trick.

The bees seems to have a fair amount of stores (nectar/honey and pollen)

We think they also had a fair amount of capped brood.  This is the area where the queen was last week. However, the sun was in my eyes and we were neither of us entirely sure what we were looking at. 

The queen has now moved into the upper brood box, which was only added last week. Unfortunately she is very shy and was scurrying down, so we didn't want to keep the frame she was on out longer than necessary.  Maybe next week I'll be quicker at taking her photo, but I hadn't really expected her to be in that box and assumed we'd missed her in the lower one.

These bees are quieter than the ones we work with on the course, so I felt happier about taking photos so close up.

An Extra Egg

Amber has always been the one who lays the biggest eggs, so we felt we couldn't complain if she had gone off lay. She stopped laying late last year but started again when we had the Light Sussex pullets.  However she stopped after a few weeks.  We wondered if she would start laying again with the arrival of our current pullets, but she didn't. Then last week she started laying, albeit thin shelled eggs, which broke easily.  The first two were too broken to use.

On Monday or Tuesday hubby collected a whole egg laid by Amber, although the shell was still pretty thin.  Wednesday I was pleased to find three good eggs in the nest box, something we had not experienced since before Easter until last week.

It's easy to see who laid what as Amber's are very big and Fudge's eggs are long and thin and fairly small, no bigger than a medium.  Smokie's are growing bigger.  We have had 2 more eggs from Amber since.