Spring Waxing Bee Hiving Moon
Kate comes home tonight. Yeah! I miss her when she’s gone. I’ll follow our usual procedure and pick her up at the Loon Cafe, conveniently located at the end of the light rail service 
from the airport. Makes the drive much shorter and I get a good meal in the bargain.
After the biting and the barking and the adrenaline I figured out a somewhat complicated solution to the Rigel/Sollie problem. It involves making sure that one set of dogs is in their crate before admitting the others to the house. This way nobody trespasses on anybody else’s territory.
It demands a careful watching of when Rigel and Vega are away hunting so I can let Sollie, Gertie and Kona inside. Or, alternatively, when Rigel and Vega are on the deck and the others are out hunting. A bit baroque I know but I have no more indentations in the leg.
(pics from April of last year)
As the Bee Hiving moon goes from New to Full, our yard will lose its snow and we will have several species of flowers in bloom, a few vegetables in the ground and as it begins to wane we should have our new bees hived and happy in their new homes. There are things that need to happen before this last, not the least moving the hives to the orchard, cleaning all the frames of propolis and burning the old hive boxes and frames I got from Mark, the bee mentor.
Seeing the bulbs planted in the fall begin to emerge always heartens me because it reminds me of hours of labor spent in the cool air of late October or early November. We won’t be here for that time next year, so probably no new bulbs this year.
In fact, I’m declaring finished to our orchard, garden, vegetable, bee expansions. We’ll stick with no more than three hives, the raised beds and other beds we have in the vegetable garden, the trees and bushes we have in the orchard and the flower beds we have in place now.
We’ll always have to replace dead plants and put in new ones in their place. We have to care for the fruit trees and bushes, plant vegetables and maintain the bee colonies so we’ll have to plenty to keep us occupied. I just want to get good at the stuff we have and begin to slowly limit the work we do over the course of the year.
somewhere up here by now. That’s one of the odd things about living in Andover, our spring arrives about a week behind the cities. Urban heat island effect, I imagine. Those of you who read this in the cities probably have daffodils blooming, have had, perhaps even a tulip or two. Our daffodils are shy, but when they come on, wow.
earth, a bit yellow at the top, then light green, then a darker green. Soon there should be other bulbs breaking through including some I’d forgotten I planted in the orchard.