Meet the New Beekeepers!

Bees buzzing around their new h

This Memorial Day weekend proved to be a very busy period as I learned Friday morning that our package of bees was ready to pick up. However, Saturday was also the Neighbors and friends Memorial Day BarBQ Bash put on by our neighbors, Kenneth and Derrellene. In the interest of keeping ourselves presentable Saturday, I headed out to Die Weide Friday to get the sweaty work of watering the orchard, berries, and garden out of the way. Using the pump and truck and the water harvest tank, I watered the garden and orchard with 300 gallons of water.

Afterwards I wandered the woods and took photos including this (very poor, back-lit) photo of a bird I have yet to identify through my searching on the web. The bird was about 1/3 smaller than a robin and skinnier. It's head was a very dark black without any crest I could see, and it's breast a pretty bright red. The beak shape doesn't match any of the birds I've found online with a black head and red breast like the "painted redstart" and the "rose breasted grosbeak". The beak could be from an oriole, but the breast is more red than orange as one finds in the Baltimore oriole and the tail should also be the same color as the breast or at least very light. (Addendum - it appears that this is likely an "Orchard Oriole")

Unidentified Bird - Black Head, Red Breast, black? split tail. Maybe oriole?

Moving from birds back to bees, after the chores I drove to the Northwest Hills part of Austin (in a bucket filling, flash bang filled thunderstorm) to pick up the package of bees. Friday evening I prepared the feeding syrup, pint jar feeders, and the safety gear for Saturday's installation. After much preparation you don't see, Inge started filming the video of us installing the bees. Note that I left the sounds natural - which includes a cardinal singing loudly, annoyingly loud wind gusts on microphone, and a continual stream of instructions from Inge, who watched the same youTube videos with me on how to install bees in a top bar hive.

 I loaded the video to youtube an hour ago but it takes up to two days for it to show up to blogger, so for now, here is the link to the youtube video. When it's visible to embed, I'll add it in.

First Bee Installation Top Bar Hive