So this morning my boss, Judy, was talking to me about a project when she exclaims, "Is that a BONG?"

Whoa! It's just a vase! Really! (Really, it IS a vase! Honest!)

Backtracking a bit: This photo – taken June 2 – shows the three original tubes are in the center right (two broken out, one not broken out).


July 8 7:45 a.m. – Looked in the Bee Condo before leaving for work. The new "mudders" (finished tube with 3-5 larvae) are in the upper left. It's hard to see in the photos below, but if you squint you can see a third tube started just beneath the farthest left mudded tube:


6:30 p.m. – While watering lettuce and bean seedlings after work I peeked at the Condo and voila! The third tube was completely mudded over!

The orchard mason bees were a qualified success. Of the three original tubes, two hatched. I wasn't in the garden much when they were first hatched, and saw a single bee only twice.

Last week I was lucky enough to see her at work, probably laying eggs or loading pollen into a tube! She sealed off the tube by June 22.

I looked in them this morning and saw a bee face peeking out of another tube. Looks like someone's working on filling up a second tube!

Definitely going to order more of girlies this fall.


Newbees

We're babysitting a hive for our friend Laura. She just started keeping bees a couple of months ago but her girls have been so successful she needed to split a hive. The hive will stay at our place for a while till she decides what she wants to do with them. (We kinda hope we can keep them around for a while.)

She brought them over to our place -- about three miles from her place -- yesterday afternoon (6/25). Since they got smoked pretty good we saw no bee action from the hive yesterday evening but today they were quite busily buzzing around the garden. Harvey was so tickled he called and gave me a call at work with a status report.

It was around 60°F this morning at 7:45 when I checked on them. Still sleeping or sipping espresso and getting ready for a busy day.