Two! Dos!

Happy birthday miss Sara. Sorry I'm not there. This weekend: cake, one of your favorite things. Or as you say "geek." mmm, everybody loves some delicious burtay geek.

yard photos

While this may look a lot like last year's strawberry flower photo, this is an all new 2009 strawberry flower photo. Plus a bunch of other things in the yard that are full of the promise of spring & a new growing season.



I didn't realize sage (the eating kind) made all these flowers.


Adorable, teeny tiny grapes.


Not just a tomato flower, but an actual TOMATO


Fava bean flowers.


Chive flower.


Non-edible cool flower that I forget the name of.


Bees! They are very busy. I was trying to get a shot of their busy-ness, but this is all I came out with before fear drove me further away.

I think many would envy

a day in the life of professor Michael Greene

http://thunder1.cudenver.edu/clas/alumni/pinnacle/greene.html


Happy almost birthday Myah!

Long live the queen!

My honeybee colony is thriving and I finally found the queen in the mess of bees inside the hive. At one point, I thought she was dead. But, it turned out that her paint mark wore off and she was hidden among the ten thousand workers on the comb. I should have known she was there because there is plenty of brood in many of the combs. The bees have been in the hive for about 3 weeks and already have 8 or 9 combs built. They bring big loads of pollen into the hive each day, but I don't see too much stored. All of the developing brood must be eating like crazy. There is a bit of nectar being stored, so I suspect we'll be able to take honey out in a month or two.

Just a quick update for all you interested in my new hobby.

-Mike

bees!

How have we gone this long without posting any pics of the bees? We have certainly done plenty of boring people to death talking about them.

OK so the bees came about 3 weeks ago. Ten thousand of them, in a wire box, in the mail. Mike picked them up from the post office & put them in their bee house in the backyard.

They are quite nice so far, the bees. They just do their thing & don't bug us. Sara loves them ... she says "bees! bzzzzzzz!" ...and wants to hold them, so we made a little fence around their house to keep a bit of distance.

The bees will make us a bunch of honey. They have already made a lot of honey comb. That's what's hanging off the wood bar in these pictures.

Yes, that's Mike in the super cool bee outfit.





Looks like they killed their queen though (when you buy bees they always get a 'stranger' queen so it's always possible that they will kill her.) So we have a new queen on the way...hopefully she'll get on better with the crew.

tulip

Estes Park at the beginning of May

We went up to Estes Park/Rocky Mountain National Park for the weekend with friends from SF. It looks really wintery in the pics, but it was pretty darn nice. Mike caught two teeny fish & Sara got spoiled by our guests.