Getting the gardens ready

I realize it's been relatively quiet in terms of bee activity since the fence was put in.  It's working great.  I check it every few days with the voltage meter and it's registering about 4,000 volts each time.  A new apple tree will be added to the fenced area, probably today, as it's waiting in its pot to go into the ground. Last night was in the low twenties so I kept it in the greenhouse for the night.  The next several nights will be much warmer so it should be ok to go in now. I do have other fruit trees in the space already and was told to just keep watering them through the cold weather and they should be all right.

More gardens were dug over the weekend, right in front of the fenced bee area. All I added to the clay soil so far is sawdust, but compost will also be added and probably some peat moss to lighten the soil.  I have time to work on enhancing the soil while plants are growing in the greenhouse.  But I haven't really designed each of the gardens yet.  It's good to have at least a sketch of a design so you can plan to have something in color in every season.  And of course, I'm striving to give my bees plenty of pollen in my own yard, although they will travel up to three miles to obtain pollen.

I'm concerned about people using pesticides in the area so I've developed a flyer that I will give to my neighbors to hopefully make them aware of the dangers of using them and how they affect the bee population (and us, for that matter). In my flyer, I will include the abstract below from a Science Magazine article sent by an UVM Cooperative Extension worker who happened to think of me when she read it. Here is the abstract I included which helps give validity to my concern:

Growing evidence for declines in bee populations has caused great concern due to the valuable ecosystem services they provide. Neonicotinoid insecticides have been implicated in these declines as they occur at trace levels in the nectar and pollen of crop plants. We exposed colonies of the bumble bee Bombus terrestris in the lab to field-realistic levels of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid, then allowed them to develop naturally under field conditions. Treated colonies had a significantly reduced growth rate and suffered an 85% reduction in production of new queens compared to control colonies. Given the scale of use of neonicotinoids, we suggest that they may be having a considerable negative impact on wild bumble bee populations across the developed world. Read more.

I do hope my neighbors think before using pesticides and hope even more that they don't use them at all.

I'm noticing the sun changing the light around my house so soon I will do another chart to see how the sunlight has changed during the month. I think it might be fun to do this for the year, say once a month, so chart out the sun in my yard over the course of time.