Autumn sunshine.

A beautiful autumn day just needs to be celebrated so today I was up with the lark and busy, busy, busy. Having set Miss C up with some school work I got down to some ironing and housework. With the washing drying and the windows thrown open I got down to the finer things in life.. enjoying the sunshine. My poor little girl slaved over a maths program https://www.khanacademy.org/. Which is actually a great site that today kept her busy without complaint for over an hour.

First I jarred up a few pound of honey

Then I picked a bowl of autumn raspberries. I don’t have many plants but they have done me proud this year. In fact the whole garden is still dotted with flowers.

  Weigela. Pale pink and lovely still.

 Michaelmas Daisies

 Spiraea flowers for the 3rd time

 Honey bees (but not mine!) enjoy the Sedum

 Sunflowers just keep flowering and flowering.

 Pyracantha berries. Could be a cold winter?

 The climbing Hydrangea is losing its leaves!

 After all our efforts we treated ourselves to a visit to a dear friends for coffee and socialisation. Usually we organise the kids into board games and educational pursuits but today we just let them play while we drank coffee and caught up. There’s always room for more work tomorrow.

Checking the bees

After some awful weather I nipped out between showers to check the varroa drop on my hives. Having put the treatment on I have to regularly pull out the bottom boards and see how many on the tiny little mites have fallen from the bees. Now some beekeepers carefully count each one but I’m afraid I’m to impatient for that so I just have a skim over the board counting roughly as I go. This year is as expected with a low drop on the hive that came from a swarm, a bit higher on the one I artificially swarmed myself and a really big count on the hive that has gone through the summer on last years queen. This one has been a huge hive with well in excess of 100,000 bees for most of the summer (I’m guessing, I don’t count the varroa and I certainly don’t count the bees!) At times I had considered splitting it but with all my equipment in use I just didn’t have the space.

Anyway here they are at their winter holiday home. The farmer has put in a wildlife corridor and they seem to be loving it with lots of fresh honey just waiting to ripen for their winter stores.

The flowers at the moment are phacelia and a little white one I don’t recogniseand some lovely stocky sunflowers that are just starting to open. 

The bees are very happy although the swarm still don’t seem so used to being handled and meet me at the car to dive bomb my head as I approach. They seem to be able to control the urge to sting, perhaps they are just being friendly!!!