A Winter's Day

I fed the bees today. It was a few weeks since I had done this so I was a little concerned that my last feeding had lasted them through the dreadful cold and wet that we have endured lately. All colonies had survived and seemed to be ready waiting for me. I had lovely cool smoke from the needles of the Mexican pine near our front door and disturbed them as little as possible during the exercise of refilling the trays with the candied honey and sprinkling it with white sugar. The bees came up licking as I did this and you'd swear they know the routine now.

They are away from the house a bit in an area where we seldom venture. The dogs never follow me there, perhaps past experience has made them wiser. There's some thick undergrowth behind the hives and while I was doing the feeding there was a familiar sound coming from the scrub. It was 'old scritchy' the whipbird cackling away like an old grump, a most welcome sound given the harshness of the winter. The whipbirds for several years have come to breed in our garden or closeby, remaining through the spring asthey raise their young, then disappear as the weather heats up in summer. It was heartwarming to notice them for the first time this season, in what is surely a sign of the approaching spring. They have not started the 'cracking' and answering yet but I'm waiting for that now.

After feeding the bees here I went up to 'Sunset' to feed the hive at Mark and Jane's and as I got out the van two magpies were warbling outrageously in unison in another promise of the nearing spring season.

Not far to go now. Still seven weeks of winter left supposedly but I think spring will be early just as winter came in weeks early. There are terrible heatwaves scorching the U.S. Perhaps we'll cop an extreme summer to follow spring.