Managing the yard while waiting for honey

Right now, there's not a lot to talk about with the bees.  We are just letting them produce more bees, gather pollen and nectar, and enjoy the great outdoors!  Well, as for the outdoors part, we're in a rainy spell here in southern Vermont so the bees are inside a lot.  I made more syrup for them yet again so will replenish their supply in another day or two.  On Friday, I replenished their syrup, and today is Sunday so I think Monday or Tuesday, I should check and plan to refill.   I'm trying to do every three days (or so) now.  In a note yesterday from imaginethathoney in Swanzy, the folks giving the beekeeping class, mentioned how, in bad weather, how important it is to feed the bees because they don't go out to gather on rainy days. So that's about all I need to do with the bees at this point.

So I'm concentrating on enhancing the yard and putting in flowers and maintain those that I have. 

I have a concern about  my pond too that I need to fix.  I was going to brag how pretty it looks right now, with the water lilies in bloom and they're beginning to really cover the pond.  But then I noticed while it was pouring out for hours at a time that the pond was losing water.  I had seen that lately so kept refilling it with the hose every  3-4 days, but this was losing it faster.  I stopped the pump and saw that I'm not losing water from the pond.  So that narrows it down to the upper pond that is also used as a filter. 

I did some adjustments there the other day so perhaps I made it worse.  I'll need to remove the rocks and look at the liner that maybe bent over to allow water to escape. See the rocks that are closest to you in the picture above? under the grass-like plant the hole goes down a couple of feet and it's filled with pea stone to a few inches beneath the water's surface.  Then the hole overflows down a 3 foot incline covered with stone (edpm lined) and covered with larger rocks.  This forms a natural filtering system, like a mountain stream filters the water.  And the pond was crystal clear until just recently when the leak worsened.

I've been adding shrubs and plants around the pond this year and hope to get a few more evergreen plants there too so that it can still look interesting in the winter.  Right now, it houses many, many frogs and maybe a snake or two. I've seen a mole run out from under the rocks a few times as well.  Fortunately no bees are trying to drink from this water, or they would drown. That's why I keep water over near the hives, providing them with a safe drinking area.

Or it could be that it's leaking where I had patched together two pieces of liner and it may be leaking at that seam.  It's possible I need to buy another EDPM liner so that I don't need to patch it, I would  try to put it right over what I currently have.  But I hope it doesn't come to that.  That is a project looming in my future...within a day or two, I can tackle that I hope.