I don't know what to think now. Do we have triplets or have the twins and the singleton just started hanging together?

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The Delaware shore looked like this every single day last week.

Doesn't get much better. Swam in the ocean every day. It's my annual religious ceremony.

Can't keep count of the fawns. I've seen the singleton a lot; today I saw these guys (pooping in unison) & then I saw another set of twins mins later.

Sorry for the bad picture.

One of my girls at the Russian sage. And a nice yellow bumblebee on the Chaste tree.

New level added today.

The bottom three hive boxes--the green ones--are now full of frames--that means 30 frames in total. The bottom two boxes are full of bees and brood (that means babies) and honeycomb (that means curing honey). The topmost green box has a good start...lots of bees building comb. I added about 5 cups of sugar water because I've been advised to encourage as much comb-building as possible this summer. They'll need it to get through the winter. I didn't see the queen today, but I didn't look at every single frame so fingers crossed that she's still in there laying eggs.

WTF?

I really don't know how to process this. The world's five big oil companies each had to submit a report to the Federal Government on how they would deal with an oil spill. So each company did as requested and submitted a report. Nearly identical reports. They all hired The Response Group of Houston, TX, to write the report. Don't you think these big powerful rich oil companies might have wanted their reports to at least look like they didn't collude??? I mean really. I'm trying my best to ignore the Gulf oil spill story but since I earned my living for many years publishing Big Fat Reports That No One Will Read I know a tiny bit about how such things are done. Didn't these companies even want to pretend that they worked independently? It may not be collusion but it sure seems fishy. Unlike the poor Gulf.

The very last pictures from Florence (cleaning off my desktop).

Nice full front yard near downtown Silver Spring.

Does this look like arugula to anyone?

I didn't plant it -- at least not this year -- but it's in my garden anyway. Has a slightly bitter taste.

My first sting! Now I really feel like a beekeeper.

Last night I decided to watch the girls for a while. They were doing some heavy bearding out by the front door--the bees hang together in big clumps that can look like a beard. I'm told that this is normal for the hot, humid weather we get here in the DC area. As usual, I was in shorts and tee shirt and barefoot, just begging to be stung. I opened the top lid and inner cover just a tiny bit to peek inside and see what they were doing and out zipped one girl who wasn't happy to be disturbed. Zap! Got me on the upper arm. I did as instructed and used my hive tool to scrape off the stinger with the venom sac attached. Meanwhile the bee was in my hair so I flipped her out and got a picture of her and her stinger (she was in the process of dying...so sad...they die after they successfully sting).

This is why I added 10 new frames last week.

But someone explained to me today that burr comb isn't such a bad sign, and isn't always something to be removed. Sometimes the queen feels more secure when she sees comb above the frames and comb below the frames. Makes her feel confident enough to focus completely on egg-laying. Interesting...in my classes they often talked about anthropomorphizing... is it a good thing or a bad thing? It helps to explain things, but is logic from a human's point of view comparable to logic from a bee's point of view?

Types of compost piles and devices. These are just some of the many, many variations.

Options 8 and 9 are mine. Option 9 (could honestly be called a no-work compost pile) sits behind my vegetable garden and it began because I just started mindlessly tossing stuff there in the spring and forgot about it. When you lift up all those weeds and grasses you find worms and critters hard at work making compost and humus.
(I'm doing this for a friend who wants some advice on how to start a compost pile.)

Option 2:

Option 3:

Option 4:

Option 5:

Option 6:

Option 7 (container plus turning tool):


Option 8:


Option 9:

See this island in my front yard? See the fawn peeking out? He/she's been there since 1 PM today. It's now almost 9 PM.