Double Dose of Nature's Sad Side

Today the land presented us with a double dose of Nature's sometimes sad story. The picture below is of a sugar syrup feeder for the bees - with dozens of swarming bees. Unfortunately I've figured out that this was a case of another hive robbing our hive.

syrup bee feeder

It took a while to figure out but I had never seen more than one or two bees around this jar at a time and this time, no more than two hours after placing the jar it was swarmed and already drawn down by a quarter.

When we arrived earlier in the day the hive was peaceful with only a couple of bees around the entrance, but on this second trip the holes were filled with bees and I noticed that several bees were fighting on the ground below the hive. That's when I figured we're being robbed! I've never dealt with this before and I let them be. When I got home I found out that we needed to reduce the entrances to a single hole to help our hive defend themselves from the robber bees. The likely result is that the robbers will steal the food our bees need to survive the winter and we may loose the hive. We'll try feeding our bees more to help them survive the winter, but since the hive lost 50% of its population during the summer, I've been worried about them making it anyway. Thus, nature's sad story one.

The double whammy sad day came as we walked the woods on the way to the trail cam. Inge spotted a full skeleton of a young buck on the big cactus trail. Since all that was left was bones and sinew we don't know how the deer died. The sad thing is that on October 1st my trail cam took the picture below of this very same deer being incredibly curious about the trail cam.

Young Buck Inspecting Trail Cam UP CLOSE!

 The below picture is of the skull found with the skeleton. I confirmed by various markings that this was apparently the same deer. I haven't walked that path in three weeks so I don't know how long he had been there. Given there was nothing but bones I doubt it was firearms deer season casualty since that started yesterday, November 2nd, but it could have been bow season victim which started September 28th. However, if he was shot, it was by an unscrupulous hunter because Milam County restricts hunters to taking deer whose antlers expand past the ears and this buck was too young to meet that criteria.

Demise of a Buck

I hope we can rescue the bees but we were both saddened at the loss of the buck. Even so, if we didn't visit Die Gruene Weide we would loose the experience of being with nature. Sometimes you've gotta take the bad with the good. An example of good below show how this week's rain filled the pond for the first time since spring. It was beautiful to hear the water burbling over the stream.

Penny in the Pond