The wild gean is out in all its glory. The leaves are just starting to open, which gives the tree a slight tinge of bronze-pink, though the individual flowers are certainly white. It is very lovely.
At the opposite end of the top lawn the Japanese cherry 'Taihaku' has just opened. I have been looking at it periodically all through the day, knowing that its season is short, and that I'll be at work for the next three days. The flowers are white, single, and large, and carried so generously that the tree appears a mass of white, again tinged pink by the newly emerging leaves. The branches spread widely, and I hope that eventually it will reach right across the lawn. After I planted it I put a bench by it, so that we could sit under it and look up at the blossom. For the first couple of years the bench was bigger than the crown of the tree, but nowadays you can indeed sit under the canopy of flowers. The story goes that 'Taihaku' was believed lost to cultivation in Japan, when in 1926 the great gardener Collingwood Ingram, an expert on cherries, nicknamed Cherry Ingram by his friends, recognised a rather tatty plant in a Sussex garden as the lost Great White Cherry, propagated it, and saved it for the world. Our plant is a descendent of that Sussex tree. My late father-in-law planted a 'Taihaku' in the 1960s, when it was not so easily come by as it is now, so my partner has a sentimental attachment to our tree.
On a different subject entirely, I inspected the bees today. I knew that all three colonies were alive because I'd had the roofs off, though not lifted the crown boards before today, to feed them when winter seemed to be dragging on for so long and I was worried they might starve. March is an easy time to lose bees through starvation. They were overwintered on mesh floors (for the benefit of non-beekeepers, the floor as you would expect is the bottom of the beehive, and was traditionally solid, made of wood. In recent years beekeepers have been experimenting with floors made out of fine wire mesh, the idea being that any of the dreaded varroa mites that fall off the bees drop right through the bottom of the beehive before they can climb back on another bee). I'd asked around other beekeepers about the merits of keeping the mesh right through the winter, and opinion seemed divided whether it would be too cold for them versus a solid floor that kept the icy winds out, or whether the additional ventilation would be a help to them by preventing condensation and damp conditions in the hive. Apart from the period when I was using a vapour based varroa treatment I've had them on mesh, and they all survived the experience despite it being a very long, cold winter.
One of the colonies was a swarm that we didn't get until last July, and it was nip and tuck whether it was big enough to be worth over-wintering or whether to combine it with the colony I split from the big colony last spring. I decided to chance it, partly because I was feeling lucky, partly because I had the spare hive and the swarm and the experiment didn't really cost anything, and partly because I liked the look of my existing stock and didn't want to mess them around. So it was a bit of a result that the swarm made it through to this April.
My two original colonies were looking fine. The big colony was beginning to fill the brood box and I gave them a super, given it is now good weather, there's a nectar flow on from the garden flowers, and it's forecast to be fine for the next several days. The colony I made from them were looking good too, though smaller. Again for the benefit of non-beekeepers, what I wanted to know, apart from whether they had enough to eat, was whether the queen was laying eggs and the workers were busy making new bees, as they should be at this time of the year, and whether they'd started thinking about swarming yet, given it's now the second week of April. In the back of my mind was the possibility of bee disease, but that wasn't the main aim of today's inspection. Looking after bees is like looking after cats, in that you don't deliberately check your cat for illness and injury each time you stroke it, but part of your mind is registering whether its coat looks right and whether it has any tender spots that might indicate a new septic bite developing.
I left the swarm until last, because they'd been a bit lively when I was feeding them, and if they were going to get buzzy I didn't want them fussing round me while I looked at the other two hives. They appeared to have gone queenless, as there were no eggs or brood. That would explain the recent slight stroppiness. I wondered whether to give them a week to see if they sorted themselves out, but decided to do what the books would advise, and gave them a frame with fresh eggs and brood on it out of the large colony. I was very careful about shaking the bees off the frame before transferring it, as I would hate to transfer the queen by mistake and knacker the good colony in my efforts to remedy the bad. In theory they should be able to make themselves a queen using one of the fresh eggs. If they don't then they can have a queen cell (developing queen) once the big colony starts trying to swarm, as I expect it will. I hear about non-swarmy strains of bees, but so far none have come my way.
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