In the garden this morning

It's been a long time since I've spent anytime out in my garden. Since my hubby decided to put one of his hives right in the middle of my raised beds, I have to time my gardening to either early morning or sunset when the "girls" are less active. It's hard to weed when you're right in the middle of the flight path. Of course hubby is never out in the garden so he doesn't see the problem. I do have some nesting birds who are doing a great job cleaning up all the bees that die off from the hive. We use to have them every where and I would have to make sure to put my gardening gloves on to do anything out in the backyard. I'm amazed at how many bees two little birds can eat. The photo above is a cantaloupe plant mixed in with my basil, marigolds and eggplant.

In my garden

Today was a Domestic Diva Day since it's been awhile. Spent most of the week demolishing my Dad's 40 year old master bath that he is finally letting us remodel. It has termites and major water damage so it has to be done. Today was the first day I could spend on cleaning up my house. To break up the marathon cleaning, I went and worked out in the back garden for a few hours this evening. We won't talk about how bad the front garden is looking right now. We have two little birds that are nesting near our bee hives. I don't have a macro lens on my camera so you can see how close (less than two feet) I can get to the Purrcy's little buddies. They were chatting at me and Purrcy to get out of the garden. I had a great picture lined up with both the male and female when I ran out of disc space on my camera - I couldn't believe it! Of course they didn't want to wait around for me to reload my camera.

Our bees have done a great job on our cherry trees. Before we got the "girls" we were lucky if we got one cherry. Now our tree is loaded with cherries. For all those people who don't think honey bees are important to our national food source, just think about what (non meat) foods you eat that don't need winged pollinators. Last year we also had a bumper crop of tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, peppers and eggplant. Got to love those bees!