With the trips to the hospital I have not finished feeding the bees.  You are supposed to keep giving them syrup until they don't take any more down to store in the hive, but I hadn't been for a few days to see if they had finished the last lot.  After breakfast I took myself up to the apiary, and found that two colonies had sucked their feeders dry, and the other two had made reasonable inroads into the last lot of syrup but not yet finished it.  On that basis I dissolved another two big bags of granulated sugar in water, to give to them later once it had cooled down.  I could have made the syrup last night, but you never know how much they are going to want and it is galling to end up pouring a gallon of sugar syrup down the sink.

Luckily the weather is still warm and forecast to remain so for several days yet, so it is not unreasonable to ask the bees to process liquid sugar solution, even though the feeding should have been done last month.  In an emergency if they were running out of food in the winter I would give them fondant, and indeed I have a small stock of the splendidly named Bienenfutterteig Feed Paste down in the garage.  I have heard it said by some old and disapproving beekeepers that some young and new apiarists can't be bothered to make up sugar syrup at all and only give their bees fondant.  This they hold to be reprehensible because of the perceived extravagance, and because it is harder work for the bees since they have to collect water to dissolve the fondant before they can eat it.  On the basis that I have never heard old beekeepers warn against over-wintering your bees on oilseed rape honey, which sets within weeks of collection, I am not sure the water collection argument is valid, and anyway there's probably enough condensation in the hive from the bees breathing.

Then I began to plant this year's addition to the crocus population in the bottom lawn, another hundred bulbs of the straight species Crocus tommasinianus.  I used to feel jealous of all the garden owners featured in magazines who said they had planted fifty bulbs ten or twenty years ago and now had thousands, since mine are not bulking up anything like that rapidly.  Then it occurred to me that since we don't cut the long grass down until the autumn it might be too thick and smothering for the crocus to seed themselves, meaning that I was relying on the bulbs producing offsets to multiply.  It was a slow process because I was tidying away the fallen remains of the long grass that the power scythe missed as I went along.

In the afternoon I went to the hospital.