The Buzz This Spring

It is still chilly at night.  We have a fire burning in our fireplace most every night to keep us warm and cozy.  However, spring is right around the corner.  There are telltale signs everywhere.  The first is our column of bees.  As soon as the sun comes out and it warms up just a tad, the honeybees become very active.  They exit the column and fly off to find flowers.  They return with a large yellow bag on their back legs.  The bag is full of pollen that has a bit of nectar to make it sticky.

Normally the bees leave during the hot summer.  It must get really hot with all of them packed into the hollow fiberglass column.  This year, however, they stayed all year.  We enjoy having them here to provide pollination in the garden and for our fruit trees.

The blueberries are blooming like crazy right now.  Looking forward to another big year of blueberry production.  I do notice that one of our bushes looks like it might have died, though.  If so, we'll need to replace it.

But the blueberries aren't the only things blooming.  The navel oranges are, too!  This past fall we got ZERO oranges.  The very hard freeze that we got last March knocked the citrus back.  It killed some trees.  What trees didn't die were severely injured.  No blooms and no fruit last year.  This year the navels are blooming.  However, the tangerines and grapefruit have no bloomed yet.  We'll see what happens this year.

A beautiful day gave us the opportunity to go to the church and do a little weed-eating around the flower beds.  We recently did some work there and spread some fresh dirt that apparently had rye grass seed in it.  The rye grass is tall and green.  We raked up all the grass and put it in tubs and dumped it over the fence for the cows to eat.  Boy, were they happy!

I stood by the navel orange tree and marveled at the cows' ability to devour all of the grass we brought them.  They are eating machines.  While I watched, I noticed the honeybees had located the blooms on the orange tree.  The bee was busy as... a bee.

Ten feet to the south and east another bee was busy gathering pollen from the flowers of a gigantic turnip that we are allowing to go to seed.

Spring is on the way, and we can't wait to get in the garden and start planting all of the spring crops!