It didn't get warm enough to open the bees. I was afraid it wouldn't. I watched the thermometer, and gauged the feeling of the air on my face periodically, but the former only briefly crept up to thirteen degrees before sliding down again, and the latter maintained a raw, nippy quality. Showers are forecast for the next three days, and a maximum temperature of eleven degrees. I don't have a good feeling about this, and am kicking myself that I didn't force myself to inspect them the week before last, the day after I went to London, but there you go. One of the commercial beekeepers at last Thursday's club meeting was saying how his colonies were being slow to build up, and he blamed it on the mild autumn allowing another couple of generations of varroa mite at the end of the season, weakening the hives going into the winter. He probably wouldn't have expected my colonies to be building up so rapidly any more than I did.
Meanwhile, the last three days' worth of clips from the wildlife camera make grim viewing. There are rabbits in the back garden, morning, noon, and evening. Also muntjac in the middle of the afternoon. The field of vision of the wildlife camera is not very big, and the video clips don't last very long, so we haven't yet worked out exactly where the rabbits are coming from and going to, but it looks as though they, or it, could be living in the rose bank. There was only ever one rabbit in shot at a time. It was an adult and not a baby, but apart from that one wild rabbit looks much like another to me. The Systems Administrator has reset the camera, now pointing directly at the suspect point in the bank rather than along its base, and we'll see what we get in the next day or two. I blame the Romans.
It was tranquil in the greenhouse, apart from a little mollusc damage. I sprinkled a few slug pellets on the affected trays of seedlings, and on the dahlia pots as the first dahlia leaves are just starting to emerge. I don't use slug pellets widely around the garden. Most plants are big and tough enough to take a little damage, and if things are real martyrs I tend to let them disappear and plant something else. Thus my collection of hostas in the open ground is limited to the yellow leaved form 'Sum and Substance'. I believe that what puts the slugs and snails off is not the colour of the leaves but their thickness. Even 'Sum and Substance' is not immune, getting mildly nibbled by the end of summer. It depends partly on how many molluscs you have and how desperate they are. I recommended 'Sum and Substance' to my mother, but in her garden it was reduced to nothing, as was 'Red October' (a rather nice form with red leaf stems) in mine.
The greenhouse is full to bursting and then some, and I'll be relieved when the chance of overnight frost is pretty much over and I can risk putting the overwintering geraniums and other tender things outside. By dint of shuffling trays of slightly more advanced seedlings and cuttings out to the cold frames I just about made space for everything I needed to prick out (some of it should have been pricked out days ago) but I really am starting to run out of room to put anything down. I broke a stem off a marguerite stepping past it to get to the staging, and rather than waste it trimmed off the side shoots for cuttings, though if they take then that will be another half dozen pots needing somewhere to live. I did consign one badly root aphid infested Geranium maderense to a bag of waste destined for the dump, since I have more plants coming on. It would be nice to eliminate the root aphid this summer if possible, through a programme of planting out, Provado and ruthless throwing away of infected pots. While I've got it I can't even resort to the generous gardener's method of making space, which is to give pots of plants away whether people want them or not.
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