Posts Tagged ‘bees’
Precious Dew
Any moisture in a drought becomes all the more precious, so a little dew in the morning takes some of the edge off how harsh it feels outside. The dew also causes all the overnight spider webs in the pasture to become highly visible in the low light of the rising sun.
The horses seem to be tolerating the dry and dusty conditions with their typical demonstration of coping skills.
In their favor, the lack of wetness has inhibited the fly populations to a significant degree. However, it has also drawn a large number of bees to hang out around the horses’ automatic waterer. Cyndie put out some apple cider vinegar-baited traps and tried a couple of bee spray applications to discourage the establishment of a hive in the body of the Ritchie waterer.
Paddock Lake has become nothing more than a dug-out depression good for dust baths.
It’s getting hard to imagine how much rainfall it will take to ever fill that crater again. With the month of September just days away, the outdoors present a distinct feeling of an early onset of fall, minus the cooler temperatures.
Maybe we’ll get a wet October, which doesn’t seem unusual at all, but I don’t recall rain in the tenth month of the year historically amounting to the level of moisture we will need to put a dent in the dryness that has occurred this summer. I’d like to hope for a lot of snow over winter to give us a kick of moisture during the spring melt next year, but the strong El Niño is expected to result in a warmer winter with less snow in the Twin Cities.
I’m getting what pleasure I can from the early morning blankets of dew until the next rain event. There’s a tease in the forecast of a 70% chance on Saturday, but I’m not holding my breath. We are hosting guests for lunch that day, so maybe that will increase the chances. One can hope.
.
.
Season’s Bounty
As always, we arrived home yesterday with a royal greeting from our animals. After unpacking the foodstuffs that made the trip home with us and then gobbling up some of it for lunch, we granted Delilah her wish and headed outside to survey the grounds.
The first thing I noticed was how much some of the grass has grown since I last cut it. At the same time, the ground seems incredibly dry. Parched and cracked enough that I don’t understand the hearty growth of some areas of grass.
The next noteworthy thing that caught our attention was the incredible buzzing sounds of a striking number of bees busy in the yellow flowering tops of goldenrod beside one of our trails.
Cyndie did a great job of capturing a photo of a couple of the happy visitors.
Not far down that same trail, we made another surprising discovery. Tucked behind a large viburnum nannyberry bush was a volunteer apple tree with an impressive amount of fruit on its limbs. It’s the first time I noticed it, which is surprising because we usually pay a lot of attention to the volunteer trees showing up beside our trails.
We made our way out into the pastures to say hello to the horses and quickly decided they were telling us the flies were bothering them. Cyndie went back and got their fly masks. The growth in the pastures is a mixture of good grass they looked very happy to be munching and a disturbing number of problematic weeds.
I will be mowing the pastures to a pretty short height as soon as I can get to it in attempt to control some of the weed propagation.
I re-stacked the dwindling number of hay bales in the shed to make room for the next delivery, now expected to arrive on Friday. By then, Cyndie will be on her way to Boston with her mother to visit Barry and Carlos. I will be stacking bales by myself.
The last stop for Cyndie on the tour of our property was her garden. She came in with quite a bounty of a photogenic variety of vegetables.
She thinks some of the growth was stunted by how dry it has been, but the overall variety of produce sure looks impressive. Pretty good for a year when her planting was hindered by knee replacement surgery back in the spring.
We’re just happy to have any bounty at all.
.
.
Relative Something 