No really, I just mean birds and bees! :-) We enjoyed 3 new chicks this year, Blacky, Sparky, and Buffy. Spring this year was long and cold and wet, which made for fabulous birds at our feeders. Following are some examples...(sorry some are hard to see, they are the shy ones)
lazuli buntings
green-tailed towhee
white-crowned sparrow
black-headed grosbeak
by the bucket handle is a cassin's finch, slightly different than our regular house finches.
Western Tanagers--yes, they are shamelessly begging at the hives for bees. They ate their fill before moving on.
We had this late snow at the end of May, the grosbeaks and buntings were back. This month has also been an exciting bee month. This is a swarm of bees that left their old home (not our hive) and tried to settle in our neighbor's dryer vent. The dark spot above Eric is actually about 15,000 bees clumped around their queen in the vent.
Eric swept them all into a box and brought them home. Below you can see the ones that he didn't get into the first box reforming their clump around the vent hole, now visible.
Then a few weeks later, another friend called with this clump of bees in their tree. We gathered them too, and brought them home. Eric has expanded the original hobby of beekeeping to making movies about bee keeping. He has had plenty of beekeeping techniques to demonstrate this month.
As for the rest of our month, we started with a visit to the Renaissance Festival where we got to see knights jousting with real wood poles. First, a shot of the knight in all his splendor...
and now a shot of the knights after breaking their lances on each other.
There were tons of little shops where the boys found swords to buy, and this lady was swallowing fire. It was a pretty fun day.
We've done some fishing. The girl in the photo is our neighbor friend, Kayla.
We went to Grandpa's fields in Payson where the boys swept their hats through the alfalfa to check for weevil.
We went to the Zoo, nobody felt like posing for a photo, so this is the best I got.
No really, I just mean birds and bees! :-) We enjoyed 3 new chicks this year, Blacky, Sparky, and Buffy. Spring this year was long and cold and wet, which made for fabulous birds at our feeders. Following are some examples...(sorry some are hard to see, they are the shy ones)
lazuli buntings
green-tailed towhee
white-crowned sparrow
black-headed grosbeak
by the bucket handle is a cassin's finch, slightly different than our regular house finches.
Western Tanagers--yes, they are shamelessly begging at the hives for bees. They ate their fill before moving on.
We had this late snow at the end of May, the grosbeaks and buntings were back. This month has also been an exciting bee month. This is a swarm of bees that left their old home (not our hive) and tried to settle in our neighbor's dryer vent. The dark spot above Eric is actually about 15,000 bees clumped around their queen in the vent.
Eric swept them all into a box and brought them home. Below you can see the ones that he didn't get into the first box reforming their clump around the vent hole, now visible.
Then a few weeks later, another friend called with this clump of bees in their tree. We gathered them too, and brought them home. Eric has expanded the original hobby of beekeeping to making movies about bee keeping. He has had plenty of beekeeping techniques to demonstrate this month.
As for the rest of our month, we started with a visit to the Renaissance Festival where we got to see knights jousting with real wood poles. First, a shot of the knight in all his splendor...
and now a shot of the knights after breaking their lances on each other.
There were tons of little shops where the boys found swords to buy, and this lady was swallowing fire. It was a pretty fun day.
We've done some fishing. The girl in the photo is our neighbor friend, Kayla.
We went to Grandpa's fields in Payson where the boys swept their hats through the alfalfa to check for weevil.
We went to the Zoo, nobody felt like posing for a photo, so this is the best I got.
No comments:
Post a Comment