Hang-em High

It's daylight savings time. The temps are warming, the bees are bringing in maple pollen.

For us that marks the time to put out the yellow jacket traps.

This time of year all the yellow jackets will be queens. Only the queen yellow jackets survive the winter. In the early spring they leave their hibernation spots to find food and establish nest sites. As soon as the queen's first brood emerges they will take on the hunting responsibility and the queen will stay in the nest to lay eggs.

Trapping queens early in the season eliminates the formation of new yellow jacket nest and reduces the yellow jacket numbers during the summer.

I have issues every fall with yellow jackets attacking/robbing my honey bee hives. 

I like to use these type traps:

This one is in the back corner of our 1/4 acre lot. The location of the traps do matter in terms of effectiveness. I haven't tried this spot before. Some spots in the yard catch about a dozen queens while other spots have trapped none during the same timeframe. I bait my traps with purpose made/bought yellow jacket pheromone.

Here is another in the front yard diagonally across the property from the first trap:

This spot under the scotch pine has been the most reliable trapping spot. This trap is about 7 feet off the ground between our driveway and the neighbor's.

Typically, we will have about a half dozen yellow jacket hives established on our property (even with the trapping). The favorite spots for nests are the barbeque, eves of the house and shed, and worse for us is within our rock wall.

George stays alert but has gotten stug in the face twice in past years.

Early Pollen Source

I took a walk this evening just before dark and saw these maple blooms. In my last post I mentioned that I saw the bees bringing in pollen that I believed was from maple. Here is some more evidence. These pictures are from the same tree a few hundred feet from our house.

You can see the stamen (white) and anthers (yellow-brown tips). The pollen is found on the anthers

It is early March and it freezes every night. Yesterday we got a couple of inches of snow. This and the previous snow started as rain then changed to snow. It still accumulates and freezes hard over night. It is not uncommon for us to get very deep spring snows. Still not much gardening to be done.

I did see garlic poking through the soil yesterday to the right of the tomato baskets. So it will soon be time to get the early stuff planted!

First flowers of the year

We were out walking yesterday and spotted our first flowers of the year. After a few minutes of internet searching I discovered the its name. It is Erodium cicutarium, redstem filaree.
Thanks MU see link:University of Missouri Extension

I found several of these plants near our home. This picture was taken on February 22, 2014 in our neighborhood in Boulder County, Colorado. I saw many plants flowering in southern exposed undisturbed (weedy) soil (clay). We are having a normal winter with snow on the ground weekly, either from larger snows (+5 inches) that take several days to melt, or smaller (<2 inches) that melt the following 24 hrs.
I didn't see any honey bees on the flowers, although I did see many bees flying in and out of my hives. The temperature is low, for bees, at about 55F.











I believe this is pollen coming into the hive.

I think this is maple pollen. My wife says she saw bees on a maple tree in our neighborhood. Below is a picture of the flower buds. I didn't see any bees on this tree, nor did I see any open flower buds on this tree but there must be somewhere on the canopy or on other trees.

Here is a link to Wikipedia that I use to help identify individual pollens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollen_source
Spring fever has officially started.