Pre-Spring Update

Spring is nearly here, or at least it feels that way. It's been such a warm winter that all the trees are a bit confused. I borrowed a tree pruning book from a neighbor and have been doing minor attempts at pruning. I started with the street trees that our neighbor, Urban Releaf, planted when we first moved in and then did just some minor pruning of our plum and pear trees. The apricot tree doesn't seem to need much yet and the fig can wait as well.

Santa Rosa Plum

Bleinheim Apricot

I put on my bee suit as well and reviewed the hive. They're busy and the upper super has honey. I'll need to add another shallow super soon as they start to fill the hive more quickly. I wanted to find the queen but I wasn't able to take all the frames out of the deep super since I injured my thumb a few weeks ago and having only one opposable thumb made it difficult to extract them delicately so I kept pissing off the bees.

Lastly, since the massacre our two remaining chickens stopped laying for a couple months, either from the shock or the natural winter ebb. They did start up again a few weeks ago and have been laying pretty regularly since. We also got five new chicks from BioFuel Oasis last week. I went with all Americaunas because they've seemed to have had the best temperament of all the breeds we've tried, although I'm pretty happy with the Buffs so far.

About four days old.