Neighbourhood canola field!

This is the view from my hive at my farm. If you look at the top left corner of the picture below you will see a yellow glow. I had no idea that my neighbour had a 40 acre field of canola planted down the road from me.

Canola field view

I went to the field to see if I could find any bees. I saw a couple and could hear a couple more. I took a picture of one flying between flowers.

Canola flower with bee behind(center)

There are so many flowers in this field. It is just crazy. Unfortunately my hive near this location is not the strongest, so I do not know how much they can take advantage of the situation.

Big bloom of Canola flowers

Apple and Cherry blooms

We are still having very wet weather. Somewhere between the rain my trees were able to bloom. The real quesiton is wether the bees were able to pollinate them. The rain knocks off the peddles, which make the flowers less attractive to the bees. Local orchards are worried that this incessant raining is going to greatly affect their pollination.

Apple Blossom

Cherry Blossom

You can see that some off the cherry blossom pedals are off of the flower. This is because of the heavy rains and some blooms are older than others.

Dandelion blooming right beside the new landing board & slotted rack.

I put on a 3rd box, by mixing some existing frames into the new box. I put in 4 brand new empty frames which I plan to remove to use as a nucleus hive in the future. I also used 9 frames from my 'dead' hives so that the bees can clean off some remaining honey.

3 Box hive

I am working out how to split the hives as cleanly as possible.

Dandelion Fields Forever...

The dandelions are in full bloom. Unfortunately we are receiving record amounts of rain; so the bees cannot get out of the hives to collect the pollen and nectar. Who ever thought a field of dandelion would be so beautiful? A beekeeper of course.

Lots of local fields are experiencing a dandelion bloom

 I was able to find a couple of bees foraging on my lawn. The pollen also indicates that they are getting a lot from the dandelions.

Honey Bee on dandelion bloom

Hopefully we can get some nice weather and the bees can get out more!

First Spring bloom

This is from a few days back. I am just getting the time to update my blog. When we got home from the hospital everything was in bloom.

Here is a web album that shows a lot of pictures of what it looked like here at the end of last week. It was gorgeous.

I also took off my formic acid pads from my hives. They will be needing honey supers added on top so they do not have the urge to swarm.

Snow?!?

Today there was some snow on the ground when I woke up and there was also some ice snow flurries throughout the morning. There was a brief stop in the wind gusts and the sun came out. I thought it would be nice to put up some photos of what spring should look like. These are some of the flowering and soon to be flowering plants around the yard.

 I am not really sure what type of plants some of them are.

Some of my apple trees are ready to bloom. This will be a small source for the bees being that there are only a dozen apple and prune trees.
My formic acid treatment is not ideal for this range of temperature but it is not too big of a deal. The forecast for next week is perfect for the formic acid treatment. They are calling for a range of 8-12 C throughout the day.