How I Spent my Summer Vacation

He's a natural...

Greenhouse Roof

There you have it folks, the first project across the finish line. I should have waited to take the photo as I hadn't yet fixed the little wrinkle in the middle (near the ladder), so you'll just need to take my word for it that its flawless! What I'm not so proud to admit is that I started working on this at 9am today and am just now finishing at 4:30pm... needless to say lots of distractions between start and finish which I suppose is a luxury I can afford given the time I have on my hands.

One of the distractions today was to take a peek inside our beehive. Glad to report that things seem to be going really well in there... lots of capped brood, larvae, eggs, and what appears to be a healthy population of workers, so still planning to harvest some honey in the next month or so. Earlier this week I noticed a few drone (male) bees walking around on the ground with deformed wings. Its hard to tell at first, but if you pick one up (don't worry, drones don't have stingers) you can see that their wings are sort of wrinkled up and stumpy, thus they can't fly and have to walk to get around. Earlier this year we learned that when you see bees walking on the ground with deformed wings it means that their wings were likely damaged while they were developing and that the culprit is a public enemy #1 to bees, the infamous varroa mite. Drone bees have a longer development period by about a week so the varroa mites tend to attach more to drones than to workers, that is unless you have a really nasty infestation of varroa then they are all over all the bees (which is what we had to deal with earlier this year). So maybe later this week might be good to treat them for varroa mite again just to stay in front of the problem.

Home Alone

Ana, Tomas, Mila, and Emilia all left Wednesday, leaving me here to fend for myself for the next 3 weeks. I've been threatening to trim the beach grasses in front of our house for months (Ana has veto'd me every time), so now that she's gone... anyway, sorry Ana. Hey look at it this way, you should consider yourself lucky that this is about as bad as I act out!

So today I got all the basics out of the way, weeded all the gardens, mowed the lawn, etc., and tomorrow I'll start my first major project - roofing the greenhouse. Last winter during the same storm that blew over our fence, our greenhouse roof peeled back like a banana and almost landed over in our next door neighbor's yard. In fact I was up on the ladder trying to secure the greenhouse roof when I heard a loud crash and turned to see the fence go down. Anyway, so tonight I took the first of what will likely be multiple trips to Home Depot for materials, and got thinking about a bunch of other potential projects. At the end of the day, they are all just distractions to keep me from missing what is really important.