Today was an unusually warm day for February in Ohio, topping out at a balmy 60F. It feels like Spring has come early, and perhaps it has, only time will tell at this point.
We were all eager to get outside to enjoy such a rare treat. The kids broke out the sidewalk chalk and bikes – their cheerful laughter reverberated off the house and trees. Our dogs got some extra outside play time – with Zoe our Border Collie intensely focused on her favorite activity of all, frisbee!
It was the perfect day for sap production from the trees – it was below freezing last night and then drastically swung to 60F today. I was able to collect more maple sap than I had any other days this season, 10 gallons! For my little homestead that’s a decent haul for the day. As I write this I’m still working on boiling it down to syrup. The black walnuts were also producing more than I’ve seen thus far, though nothing in comparison to the maples. And although I have lids on my collection buckets, a couple of them had a bee in them. I offered each bee a twig to grab on to and left it at the hive entrance where their sisters would clean the sap off of them and help them to recover from the ordeal.
Speaking of the bees – I was pleased to see activity from both hives today with bees going in and out of the entrance in search of food and water. There are little to no flowers blooming at this point, though if there’s nectar to be found, they’ll know where to look! There’s also the need for ‘cleansing flights’ to relieve themselves outside of the hive.
Fun fact – worker bees will not relieve themselves within the hive if they can avoid it, often holding their waste in through the winter; for the bees that generally do not leave the hive such as the queen or the drones (though the drones do not get to stay in the hive over the winter), the worker bees remove the waste from the hive to dispose of it.
Once four o’clock rolled around and it would only be about two hours until dark, I went over to the chicken run to let them have some supervised free ranging time. They eagerly ran up to the run door in anticipation. I barely had a chance to step out of the way before they came running out. They scampered off in all directions in search of bugs to eat.
I took advantage of the nice weather to get in the garden and pull out the dried, dead marigolds, asparagus fronds, and sunflowers that I left up for the wild birds to forage from during the winter. I piled them up and am trying to decide if I want to haul them over to the chicken run for composting or if I want to try to burn them in place for some biochar to enrich the garden that way. Cluckles and some of his ladies joined me in the garden digging around for tasty treats. I came across a worm for them and as I tossed it, Cluckles called to the girls and bobbed his head to gesture where to find the treat. Always a gentleman.
Tomorrow is supposed to bring equally as gorgeous weather so we will see what treasures it has in store.