Blooming Huisache

Another lovely sign of spring - the Huisache trees are totally bursting with blooms! I wish my mom was here to see it with me. :)

Mistletoe Year Round

One of the reasons I love Texas so much - anytime, anywhere. You can find it if you just look. :)

KWED Garden Show

This is my beekeeping man getting interviewed earlier this month during the Saturday morning garden show on our local AM radio station, KWED. As usual, I missed it b/c I was assigned market duty that morning. Boo.

Gorgeous Stormy Skies

Lately the skies have been wonderful to watch - one of my favorite things about this area. The sky is big enough and wide enough to see some spectacular sunsets, sunrises and plain old pretty skies year round. I love the landscape of the east coast where I grew up but I have grown to also love the Texas sky. :)

Happy Rainy 2013

After a long drought in rain and posts, I am back and so is the rain! We were just way to busy this past holiday season for me to attempt to keep up all the blogs so I had to pick the Bee Blog. Sorry! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and that the new year kicked off great so far. Here's to another really awesome year for us and our bees. :)

Year of the Snakes

If you are a beekeeper or you just work out in the fields of Texas, you should probably invest in some serious snake boots. I feel much better now that my beekeeper has a good pair of Chippewa boots.

Pink Fire Trucks Tour

At lunch I joined a few friends at the hospital to support a fundraiser and awareness campaign hosted by our local fire fighters association as part of October's breast cancer awareness month. So glad I went.

Working Together

Last week Mark helped out his former employer - City of Seguin - with a wild hive in Central Park. It was fun to tag along and watch him work to get the bees off the pecan tree. They were rather gentle but you never know with a wild hive so better to remove them now before they become aggressive, as wild bees here in Texas tend to get. And how fun to ride a cherry picker. :)

Hair Haus & Locks of Love

That's me outside Hair Haus yesterday evening - shout out to my favorite beauty shop! They were one of several local downtown merchants hosting a late evening opening as part of Seguin Night Life and in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, you could get your hair cut for FREE if you wanted to donate it for a good cause. In my case, I'm sending the little bit of hair I cut off to Locks of Love, a non-profit organization that accepts these hair donations in order to create wigs for cancer patients undergoing treatment which may cause them to lose some or all their hair. Here's what I started with -

Thank you, Audra, for making this such a nice moment for me and my sister. You rock.

Pressed Shirts

If there's one thing I love about men's fashion, it's the marvelous shirts and ties - so many colors! Even the understated colors are wonderful. When Mark went back to San Antonio for a few months, I was too busy with two jobs to iron (not a task I hate, actually) so I dry cleaned his shirts weekly. We love City Cleaners - small, locally owned company. Great old building. Friendly owners and operators who remember you when you come in. Actually, if they see you coming, they go ahead and start pulling your clothes. How lovely.

Cloudy Fall

 A wet fall and winter is always better for our bees than a dry one so we are thinking next year should be great for wildflowers given all the moisture in the air lately! I snapped the above one last Sunday morning. I snapped the below shot at lunch today as I left the office at the mill. I love a cloudy sky sometimes.

Cool Mornings and Open Windows

That's right - we finally are feeling a tad bit more fall in the air! And that means it was cooler outside that it was inside this morning and I opened the windows in the dining area so we could enjoy the sounds of the birds chirping in our backyard. Even Smokey is starting to enjoy the new sights and sounds of his new yard.

Raindrops on the Plumeria

It's amazing how crunchy things can get in the South Texas heat and drought. It's equally amazing what a little rainy spell can do to moisturize things around here. We're finally moving into fall a little bit and rather than the upper 90 degree temperatures we've been getting, we've been enjoying cloudy days and 80 degree weather for a few days now. Despite it being the one weekend we set aside for moving, we can't begrudge the skies for dumping rain. We welcome it. Makes for good blooming and winter honey for our bees. This is the Plumeria leaves on a plant that has struggled quite a bit through the years. My brother-in-law gave it to us maybe ten years ago and when we put it in the ground it finally really took off. It reached heights taller than my 5'1" reach but then suffered a huge setback one year. No, not from drought, but rather, from a very hard freeze we had. Poor thing. That actually happened twice but here it is - still alive. Sadly, the pink and yellow bloom Plumerias from my mom did not make it that freeze we had. This one blooms white and is quite lovely.

Sunset and Stormy Skies

We've actually been getting a bit of a rainstorm here and there and we even have a chance for a shower overnight. How lovely. Gives the bees a chance to build up some honey reserves for the winter. :) This was shot last night over the Lazy U Ranch along the Deadman Creek area. Lovely out there.

Rain in the Gauge

And we finally got some rain this past Saturday night - a wonderfully robust storm came through and dumped some much needed water on the entire area! Yay! Sorry for the lack of posts, it's been crazy busy with Mark working full time and us still trying to run GBR in the evenings and weekends. I also had to be gone two weeks for CMC so there goes August pretty much. :) Oh, and we'll be moving soon. Man, I'm a little tired.

Pollen & Allergies

Pollens in and around Seguin. My days lately are centered around IT work at the mill or bee and honey work at home. So here's what I see about Seguin! :) The pollen you see here is what is in our local honey and it's what helps me to enjoy the outdoors again now that my sinuses are under more control. Have a great day!

Fallen Hive & an Appearance in the Paper

Poor hive - downed by some dry, dry ground. Looked like the ground simply gave out under the stand. It is incredibly dry lately and horribly hot. HOT. Like when you walk out and the sun hits your bare skin...feels litterally like an oven. HOT. The bees were okay though not happy, happy when Mark set them back upright. I meant to share this much sooner but with all that's been going on...I simply let time slip by me. Our little business continues to do well and we always appreciate some press. I would like to add that I did not say to microwave honey as this write-up makes it sound. I've had a few people confirm that they read it as if I was saying to do that if honey crystalizes. We never do that. Just put it out in the Texas heat and it'll decrystalize in a day. Or some hot, hot water with the lid on a pot will do the trick just fine. Microwaving will chemically change the honey and why would you want to mess up a great thing to start with, right?

Another Day of Interesting Clouds

Though it did not rain on us today, we sure did have a wonderful week of rains and interesting cloud days. Today was wonderful and I had to take a few minutes to snap some of these shots. This is photographed with an iPhone and the Photosynth application. Then I app'ed it with Camera+ mostly for cropping purposes.

Rain on Lemongrass

Finally got some rain yesterday. It wasn't a downpour but that's okay! Not sure the ground would know what to do with all that water anyway. :) This should make all the plants very happy as we had a nice lightning show to boot.

Clouds But Little Action

Lately we've been getting some weather action in the way of clouds and stormy looking clouds but then it all breaks up and we end up with very little or no rain. We sure could use a nice soaking soon all around. Some surrounding areas have gotten a bit of rain but you can see signs of the dryness all around. The below shot is from one of our bee yards about seventeen minutes from the house. Cracked ground is a common sight now.