Spring Beauties

The flowers have been so pretty this spring.  Somehow we've gotten lucky and the hard frosts have not been devastating.  

Last night walking back from the night check.  I love the way the porch lights illuminate the rain, snow, ice and flowers throughout the seasons.  

Some fog the other morning.

The old magnolia and an ancient redbud.  I have no idea how old that redbud is or even how it's still standing, honestly, but I like to think it might be because they are taking care of each other.

Green.

The greenhouse was outstanding all winter and is still going strong.  

I shared this picture the other day, but today we'll focus on the flowers :-).  I love our yard full of color each spring.

The lilacs are just starting to open.  The branches are loaded with buds and most seem to have survived the frost last week.  Fingers and proboscises crossed! 

 

Not weeds to me :-).

Happy Bees

 

I am happy to report that Stella's bee hives are all alive and well and once again we've made it through winter with no losses.  That's a pretty impressive record actually, as we've heard quite a few stories of significant hive losses over the last few years.  

We are no experts and aren't really "successful" honey producers these days, but we are very happy to help maintain a steady bee population and we think the keys to our successes/good luck are not opening the hives and bothering the bees any more than we absolutely have to and not taking too much much honey from them.  We've also never treated our hives for any serious diseases.

If you are looking for an enjoyable book to read about beekeeping...and life, I will once again recommend A Country Year:Living The Questions by Sue Hubbell.  It's one of my very favorites.

Here is a fun (and a bit hard) new puzzle.  For those keeping score at home, disregard my work time.  I actually worked it twice, once as a gift from a friend and once after I created it to my account so I'd have record of my working it...or something.  

Where On Earth...

...is the blog?!?

 It's sure a puzzle...and an actual puzzle.

A Blast From The Past

I've been crawling back through old files trying to find pictures of early bottle lambs and a. we didn't take many pictures back then b. what few pictures we did take are not great c. the old camera phones were not great either.  However, a bad picture taken with a bad camera is still way better than no picture at all :-).

For anyone who hasn't been following the blog since those early days, here is a picture/time I'd almost forgotten.  Baby Maisie is two months old, still living in the house and still small enough to curl up with Betsy on the couch.  

Priceless.

March

Apple changed their software for making the Memories and I had a ton of trouble getting the month end compilation put together.  When I finally got it to sort of work, I no longer could find the setting for length and it ended up almost 10 minutes long.  

I manually pulled out pictures and videos...and more pictures...and more pictures until I finally had it down to around five minutes.  I still felt it was too long for anyone besides me to watch, but when I really couldn't pull any more pictures out I had to just accept that March was one busy month!

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