I ordered a new beehive last month and it arrived on Wednesday. It was a kit, so I spent the afternoon assembling it and the rest of the week painting it. I used the last bits of some of my barn quilt paint, so the hive turned out to be very colorful. This is a different kind of hive from the type I already have. It is called a Warre (pronounced war-ray) hive and it doesn’t use pre-formed frames. Instead it has what are called top bars that allow the bees to build natural honeycomb instead of forcing them to conform to the pre-formed pattern. I read a lot about it and was impressed with what I read, so I decided to give it a try. If it works as well as they say, I will eventually switch my other hive to a Warre hive too. I have new bees arriving sometime in late April or early May to take up residence in the new hive.
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| The unassembled hive (and Pancho). |
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| The finished hive. |
While waiting for spring to arrive, last week I reread a book I love, North with the Spring by Edwin Way Teale. Teale was a naturalist and a great writer. He wrote a series of books about the seasons. In North with the Spring, he started at the southern tip of Florida in late February and then drove north following spring as it advanced northward, finally ending at the Canadian border in Maine on the first day of Summer. His wife was his traveling companion. They stopped along the way to visit natural wonders and he described the plants and animals and people he observed. It is a wonderful book. Every time I read it (this is my third time) I want to go and see the places he wrote about. I always wonder how different those places are now from what he saw in 1951.
March, at least here at the beginning, is a dingy and a messy month. The snow on the ground is dirty and trampled. The winter’s accumulation of fallen twigs, pine cones, and other things litter the lawn. Everything looks like it needs a good washing up – inside the house as well as outside. Every year by the time March rolls around, I’m ready to start Spring Cleaning. I itch to gut rooms, empty closets, to scrub and paint and organize. I want clean windows, clean drapes, clean blinds, clean floors. I want to haul away everything we’ve acquired and stashed away that we do not use. I want to clean out flower beds and rake the lawn and burn the dead wood and other debris. I long to get started. I don’t think the rest of the family is as keen on Spring Cleaning as I am. They usually groan when I mention it. Sometimes I accuse them of praying for continued winter weather to try and stall my plans. But it will happen – spring will come and the cleaning will commence.
Some of my neighbors, Dick and Helen Young over in Newfield, and Jeannette Buck our neighbor down the road in Raymond, have reported seeing robins in their yards now. We have not seen any yet here in Gold. But then, there is no place for robins to land here yet. We only have a little three foot patch of lawn that is not covered with snow.
I took a walk through the woodland garden last week on one of the warmer afternoons (40°) looking for signs of spring. The snow pack is always thinner there because of the trees and open ground always appears there first. There is a bit of open ground there now, but still no sign of the daffodils, blue bells, and hellebores that should soon emerge.
But there are definite signs of spring. Our hens are responding to longer hours of daylight by giving us more eggs. We collect a dozen a day now and that will increase and the days grow longer and warmer. Josiah checks the turkey pen every day for eggs. The turkey hens often start laying in March and it is too early, so we take the eggs away. We’ll let them start to nest in mid-April. And in the house there are flowers blooming. My potted clivias have opened the first of their happy orange flowers. My seed trays upstairs are sprouting. Stacey laughs at how much I fuss over them, but I can’t help it. They give me hope.
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| The first of the clivia flowers. |
