Planting

A summary of what I've planted so far..

So far it's been mostly round-seeded peas, which are a lot tougher than the sweeter wrinkle-seeded varieties. I've still got to get my onion sets in, but I haven't been well all week. At the beginning of the week I just about managed one tray of peas and ended up with my head spinning. I'm getting a bit better each day, so maybe next week.

The list so far:

Peas

Kent Blue
Winterkefe
Dwarf Grey Sugar
Goldensweet
Carouby de Mausanne

Salmon-Flowered
Umbellata PI 269788
Umbellata PI 269787
Mummy White
Mummy


Serpette Guilotteau
Robinson's Purple Podded

Latvian
Carlin

Biskopens

The first five are all mangetouts. Kent Blue is excellent, very sweet, and best harvested when the peas are almost full-grown. Goldensweet is possibly very old, possibly imported from India. Carouby de Mausanne is a giant sugar pea with five-inch pods. These were widely grown in Victorian times, but have almost disappeared.

 Salmon Flowered, the Umbellatas and Mummy White should all be umbellate; Salmon Flowered is the ony one I've gown before, so it's going to be interesting to see what they all turn into. Serpette Guillotteau is a round-seeded French variety which I find very productive, and Robinson's Purple Podded is as the name implies, a purple podded variety from Robinson's Seeds. Again, it's very productive.

Carlin Pea is the oldest known variety, recorded from 1562, four years after Elizabeth 1 came to the throne. The peas are apparently about 25% protein, while modern varieties are more like 5%. Latvian looks rather similar, and they both have speckled seeds, which are unusual in a podding pea. It may be another very old one, but there's no written history.  Biskopens has deep, reddish chestnut-coloured seeds, and that's all I know about it. The varieties I've grown before are all quite tall by modern standards. Kent Blue and Salmon Flowered are relatively short at around four feet, the rest average about five feet.

Brassicas

Ragged Jack Kale, saved last year. It's the first time I've tried saving brassica seed, and I'll be interested to see whether it comes true. It should do. It's an old British kale, quite small as these things go, which looks much like Red Russian. I've read that it may once have been a perennial, but was  reselected as a biennial by Victorian seed merchants.

Daubenton's Kale, ex HSL. This perennial rarely sets seed, and is normally propagated by cuttings. I already have a variegated variety.

Eewige Moes kale. Via a seed swap; it sounds very much like Daubenton's; there are about twenty known perennial kales. I'm told:

'Perennial kale, very old Dutch heirloom dating back to 1800's and some suggest maybe even as far back as the Roman era. Grows 3-4'' high  with dark green leaves which can be harvested year round, young leaves are good as a spring type cabbage early in the season. Grow in full sun although will tolerate some shade, can be grown from seed or cuttings.'

Kailyard Kale. From eBay, this may be the same as or similar to Cottager's Kale. It's a hardy Scots varietiy, and I know no more about it than that.

Couve Tronchuda. This is an old Portugese type of cabbage. The particular variety, which is nameless, comes from Thomas Etty, and should be hardy, unlike Portugese varieties. I've tried these, and failed to get them through the winter, so I wasn't able to get seed.

Violetto di Sicilia cauliflower. This is via a swap. Seeds of Italy do a similar or identical purple variety, and I believe it's similar to an old British one, Purple Cape.

Lettuces

Drunken Woman. Looseleaf, with red and green leaves. And to continue the misogyny,

Fat Lazy Blonde.  A large loose butterhead, which has been around since at least 1850.

True Potato Seed

This is seeds, not seed potatoes, which are small potato tubers. It's used for breeding.

Skagit Magic This line has some blight resistance. It's a late main, which could perhaps be either selected or crossed for earlier cropping. Some tubers are white, some have purple markings.

Blue Belle. Purple marked tubers

Russian Blue. I don't know anything about this one.

EDIT Biskopens appears to be a Swedish field pea with red or purple seeds. It's going to be interesting to see what this turns into!

 

Vandalism

I can only remember one shed burning on the site before, and that was someone with a grudge against the plotholder. We've had several plots vandalised, doors broken, a polytunnel slashed, and one shed incinerated.

 

 

 

Broad Beans

I haven't been feeling well, but I was a bit better today - a two-day attack of migraine has just about died down - so I managed to get to the allotment. The last bits of snow are melting fast. The bad news is that by last bee colony has died out. I haven't investigated, but it was going strong before the last cold spell,  and it had food available, so I'm pretty sure it'll be isolation starvation. The bees will have clustered around the brood, and it's been too cold for them to break cluster. They may all have been crowded on frames with no food.  Never mind; there are very few years when I don't have a swarm or two move in. Give it a couple of months, I'll probably have bees again.

I managed to start nine varieties of Broad Beans, in pots. Last year I started working on a grex; you plant a lot of different varieties together, let them cross, save the seeds, and keep selecting. In the end, you get your own, rather variable, variety.

Last year I planted seven varieties, but the waterlogging was so bad only three of them produced any beans. These were Wizard, a field bean type from Real Seeds, Red Epicure, a red-seeded longpod, and Dumont, a Californian grex which turned out to be extremely hardy. I've planted the hybridised seed from these, and added six more varieties.

There's Aquadulce - I was suprised not to get a single bean off these last year, as they're really tough and it's never let me down before - Fava Lungs Delle Cascine from Italy, Karmazyn,another red-seeded variety; all of these are longpods, with large seeds, and a lot of them in each pod,  and three more small seeded varieties. There's Crimson Flowered, a tender variety with, as the name implies, red flowers. This one's probably been around since the 18th Century at least. Oldambuser Wierboon is a Dutch landrace, and Kaulion Valkea is from Finland. Let's hope the rain lets up this year and gives them a chance!

Peas!

I've really neglected this blog recently, but never mind. Hopefully this year will be better in terms of both weather and health. The allotment's been a sea of mud most of the winter, when it wasn't covered in snow, and I haven't managed much at all. Three bee colonies have died out, two due to nosema (I should have changed their comb last year), and one probably thanks to a badly mated queen.

I've reached the point of trying to make up my mind which peas to grow.

As you can see, I've accumulated a lot of varieties, some of which are vanishingly rare. I'll grow several of the ones I have plenty of seed for, to produce a crop, and as many of the others as I can, to save seed. I'm particularly interested in some umbellate varieties I've managed to get from the States.

These are one of the earliest types of sweet-tasting pea, bred in southern Europe in the second half of the 17th Century. The earlier field peas were grown for animal feed and savoury dishes like pea soup and pease pudding. They crop abundantly, and are full of goodness - the oldest known variety, the Carlin Pea, which was recorded in  1562, is said to be 25% protein - but they're not sweet tasting unless you pick them when they're immature.

 The new types caught on, and were introduced to England by Charles II's court; they remained popular until the early 19th Century, when they were superseded by the first of the modern wrinkled types. As far as I know, the only umbellate, or crown, pea currently being grown in the UK is the Salmon Flowered pea; it's about four feet high, and crops lightly. Like the others in thes group it has a growth defect known as fasciation; the stems are thick, and the flowers and tendrils are borne at the top of the plant. All the flowers come out together, unlike most peas.

 

 

I've got two packets of 'Umbellata' with accession numbers; they presumably came form a seed bank. There's 'Mummy White' and 'Mummy'; 'Mummy White' is said to be umbelliferate, of it's the same one I've read about, and I know nothing at all about 'Mummy'. There was a craze for all things Egyptian after Britain siezed the country during the Napoleonic Wars, and one of the tourist scams of the day was to 'discover' peas while unwrapping a mummy. They were sold to the unsuspecting at suitably inflated prices, and inevitably turned out to be just like any othe pea of the period. A similar craze followed the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1924, and produced a rash of peas with names like 'Tutankhamun' and 'King Tut'. Going by photos I've seen, some 'mummy pea' varieties are umbellate, some aren't. I can't wait to see what these come out like!



 

Raised Beds

It's been a while since I posted; between the weather and a nasty bug, I barely saw the plot in the last few weeks of last year, let alone did any work. But when I've had the chance, as you can see, I've been working on my raised beds. They're made of old scaffolding planks, which I get free, treated with creosote substitute. They're the full length of a plank, whatever that is, by three and a half feet wide. That way I can reach the middle; if you've got long arms, you might manage four feet without stretching.

Filling them is several days' work, as I don't want to do my back in again. I've used autumn leaves, decayed leafmould, and topsoil. The snowy one in the background is topped off with grass cuttings - actually it's about fifty percent moss, and will probably grow - with garlic and saffron planted. This one's going to be planted with various alliums. They can be lifted around midsummer, giving me a chance to do whatever topping up turns out to be necessary.

If I can manage one more this winter I'll be satisfied; two and I'll be happy. It's not my favourite job, but I should be able to do a fair few over a couple of years.

Bonfire

I haven't been posting much, mainly because it's been such a horrible depressing season. The latest is that my climbing beans were held back so much by waterlogging that most of them flowered too late for the beans to ripen, and they've rotted. So I've got very few to plant next year. The only one which did reasonably well was Kew Blue, which I'll be growing masses of next summer.

I've built and filled a raised bed, and planted two rows of saffron and two of garlic in it. Saffron used to be grown commercially on quite a large scale in Britain (hence Saffron Walden), so it should do well. Like most crocuses, it doesn't like waterlogging, so it had to wait till the bed was finished. This has taken ages thanks to a bad attack of flu. So it's gone in very late, and I'm not expecting any saffron this year, but I should get some in twelve months or so.

However depressing the season's been, there's nothing like a bonfire to cheer you up!

 

Supersedure

I had a look at that hive which split itself yesterday. The queenright part is going great guns. The part which was queenless has a reasonable amount of stored honey and pollen, eggs and open brood in a good pattern, and capped worker brood with a lot of gaps, as though some of the larvae are being removed. They're obviously not happy as they have three classic supersedure cells.

 

 

This isn't my pic - the bees are blacker than mine, and that cell's hatched - but this would be a typical supersedure cell. The bees build very few, typically in the middle of a frame. If they're preparing to swarm (highly unlikely in September!), then they build a lot more cells, usually along the bottom and edges of the frame. 

The bees usually understand what's going on far better than the beekeeper. There's evidently something wrong with the queen, and so they're raising a new one. I still have a few drones, though they've chewed out the remining drone larvae, so there's no reason why the queen shouldn't mate successfully.

The local bees are hybrids, with a good deal of native blood. There's a lot of Italian in there, as very large numbers of Italian queens were imported after the First World War. There will be some Carniolan, from central Europe, and doubtless traces of other stocks. The old native British bee is known for its habit of retaining drones late, sometimes keeping a few through the winter, and superseding at this time of year. I've been hoping I could bring this tendency out in my bees, as many strains, usually those with more imported blood, get rid of their drones earlier in the season. I don't want my queens mating with them if I can avoid it. It's going to be interesting to see whether theat colony comes through the winter!

Teeth on the loose

Something's been going round the site chomping broad bean pods. The toothmarks are quite regular, and considerably larger than a rat's. Maybe a rabbit?

And something - probably the same something - has bitten through most of the stems on this wigwam of Kew Blue French beans. Hopefully they'll grow back, but they'll be set back by several weeks, and they're late enough to start with. I deliberately planted them in a weedy spot; they'll tower over the ground elder, and I can dig that out properly over the winter.

Rosebay willowherb. It's nice and cheerful, as long as it isn't on my plot! It's a weed of damp places and bare soil, but that pretty much describes the site.



Moving Queen

I had a look at my swarm hive today. I've been feeding in a frame of foundation - sheets of  embossed beeswax which the bees pull out into comb - once a week. So every week, I've been taking out a frame, with brood and honey. I've been putting that into a spare broodbox sitting on top of the hive; the brood hatches, the bees move down to join the rest, and the honey eventually gets moved down. It's a method I use every year, and I've never had a hitch. This time, I pulled a frame out of the top box, glanced at it, and there was the queen in the middle. She's supposed to be in the bottom box, busily laying away. So I started cursing myself for moving her up by accident, put her down below, and then statrted thinking. Of course, I'd followed my normal practice, and knocked all the bees off the frame before I moved it up. It's a sensible precaution, since it's so easy to miss a queen.

So I had a close look. In the top box, I found eggs, and one-day-old larvae. In the bottom box, I found two-day-old larvae, but nothing younger, plus capped queen cells. Eggs take three days to hatch, so the queen must have moved up about four days ago. Last time I opened that hive was seven days ago. She must have forced her way through the queen excluder, probably attracted by the smell of the brood in the top box.

It's not impossible; I've seen it before. Some years ago, I was smoking a hive, when I saw a kestrel drop into the next plot, a few yards away behind the hedge. I watched for it, and after a couple of minutes, it rose with a small mammal in its talons. Only then did I realise that I was still puffing away on the smoker. The bees must have been half suffocated. I found the queen, a great fat thing, crawling about on top of the excluder. There were eggs below, and no eggs or brood above. I could only conclude that I'd driven her through myself.

A one-day-old worker larva can be converted into a queen successfully, as the diference is nothing more than an extra sugary and nutritious diet. Older larvae can be converted, but don't make good queens. the cell is capped five days after hatching, so a cell capped after four days can produce a perfectly good queen. Or it might not. the queen was only two boxes away, so those bees will have been getting at least a little of the queen pheromone which, among other things, suppresses queen raising. Under those circumstances, they're unlikely to raise a bad queen.

I've still got lots of drones - no good making queens if there's nothing for them to mate with - so I moved the bottom box across onto another stand, put the top box where it had been, with a couple of extra frames of honey and pollen, and put everything back together. The old queen has some brood on about three frames, stores, and the flying bees. She should soon lay up a decent sized broodnest. The second box has the brood, queen cells and young bees. A new queen should hatch in a week or so - it takes fifteen days from laying - and mate. I may have to feed them, but they're good bees which have been bringing in pollen and honey all through the vile weather, so perhaps not.

Blight?

I'm not certain, but it looks unpleasantly like it. I've taken off the dubious foliage and put in in a dalek. We'll see. Meanwhile, on a pleasanter note, the beans are finally showing signs of growth.

I had a look at the bees, and finally found and marked the swarm queen. She's a great fat, dark thing, and as always she left me wondering how on earth I managed to miss her for so long. The other hive has most of the bees down below, where I wanted them, with a suffient number in the top broodbox. The new queens should have hatched by now, and they were taking in loads of pollen. There won't be a mated queen yet, but pollen going in is usually a sign that all's well.

Swarm Prevention and Old Potatoes

I opened my established hive the other day, and found a dozen or so queen cells along the bottoms of the frames. Obviously, they were about to swarm. This is colony reproduction. A queen can't survive on her own, so the old one flies off with half the bees in the colony, leaving the young bees, brood, and queen cells behind. A new queen mates, and the old colony carries on. Work in the States, in an area with a similar climate to the UK, suggested that about 25% of swarms would normally survive their first winter. The work was, of course, done before the arrival of the varroa mite, which decimated feral bee populations.

So I went through the colony, found the queeen, caged her, and put her aside. Then I got a spare broodbox, with empty comb. This went at the bottom of the hive, in place of the old one, and I put a frame of comb with brood in the middle of it. On top went a queen excluder, and some honey supers, which are used to contain the surplus honey I get. A hive is essentially a pile of sturdy wooden boxes, and they just sit one on top of another. On that went an intricate and ingenious device known as a Snelgrove board (shown in the pic), and the original broodbox on top of that, with bees and brood. The roof went on, and I ran the queen in through the entrance.

The flying bees would have gone straight back to the original entrance, so the bottom box ended up with the queen and the older, flying bees; pretty much the same as if they'd swarmed. The addition of a little brood is to stop them flying off; they won't abandon it. The lack of brood, queen cells and younger bees will stop them swarming.

At the top are the young bees and most of the brood, with no  queen or older bees to swarm out. The queen cells with hatch, and one or more - the old myth that there's only ever one queen in a hive is wrong as often as it's right - will mate and start to lay. The Snelgrove board has numerous little entrances which can be opened and closed, and can be used to move bees from the top box to the bottom. So I can maintain the population of older workers down below, and still expect to get a honey crop from the hive, as long as the eternal rain finally stops.

This is a very old French potato with the embarassing name of 'Negresse'. Well, you'd be emabaraased if that was a term which would once - and occasionally still is - applied to members of your family! The skin is very dark purple, almost black, and the flesh purple. It's about 200 years or so old, possibly an original import from Peru, Obviously, those were slavery times. If I can get any ripe seed from those flowers, I'll try growing it, and you never know, I might end up with something I could name 'African Queen' or something appropriate.



This is asimilar very old, black, French variety called 'Vitelotte'. The tubers came from the local market, and as you can see, they didn't appreciate being there. It's not growing well at all. However, as long as it produces some tubers, that's all I ask for this year.

The problem is that, like all really old varieties, these are late maincrops. Earlier cropping potatoes are the result of European breeding, and came along later. Endemic blight hasn't given them much chance, though I have managed to keep Negresse going for a couple of years. We didn't get blight last year, due to the drought, but that didn't give the spuds much chance either, and the current very wet weather is creating ideal conditions for the fungus. It hasn't appeared yet, but if this persists, it surely will.

 

Update

The water's drained away, though some low-lying plots were partly under water for a couple of days. Nothing's obviously damaged, but the big question is how much root damage has been done. If there's a lot, vegetables stop growing, and the crop's lost.

I had a look at the swarm, and gave it several frames of foundation (sheets of wax embossed with a hexagonal pattern) to draw out into comb. Swarms are good at that. They had several frames of eggs and very young - first day - larvae, which is a very good sign.

Floods!

Half the site was under water yesterday after a severe thunderstorm. The Association secretary had her hallway flooded, which is worse.

My broad beans, looking even more miserable than before. They were perking up and growing with the warmer weather.

There's a sewer under the lane on one side, and it always blows in a severe flood; this manhole cover has lifted right up. Part of the problem is that floodwater goes down the same pipe as the sewage, which obviously saves a great deal of money, but it means that the system floods. When it gets overloaded, it blows into the streams, so any time we get a flood it's safe to assume it's diluted, untreated sewage, with all the health implications that implies.

This is the culvert at the bottom. The curved line of masonry is the brickwork over a three-foot tunnel running under the railway and canal. Normally the water's an inch deep; if it had been any deeper, it would have started backing up, and the whole lower end of the site can flood.

On a brighter note, a large swarm of bees, bigger than it looks here, moved into one of my empty hives on Tuesday. I've been expecting them for several weeks. Every time the sun came out, there would be excited bees staking out the hive. Every time it rained, they'd disappear. Bees only swarm on good weather, but they moved in as soon as we had a sunny day.

Miserable Broad Beans



 These are the broad beans I planted at the begining of March. As you see, they're a fraction of the size they ought to be, owing to the dismal weather. I put in seven varieties; the tougher ones have survived well, and are flowering well considering their size. The weaker have done nothing but sulk. A lot were finished off by slugs, but every variety has produced at least a couple of plants with flowers. So the plan is to save seed from every one. The stronger varieties have the bulk of the flowers, so everything can be expected to have crossed with them. Next year's seed should preserve 90-odd percent of each genotype, while at the same time hopefully being tougher, which is one of the characteristics I'm looking for. I'll add a couple more varieties to the mix, save seed, and comtinue the process the followint year. Meanwhile, I'll have at least some beans to eat!

A dog rose in the hedge. 

A Small Copper butterfly sunning itself when the yellow god in the sky made a brief appearance.

Yellow Flag Iris

When they dredged the local canals about 15 or 20 years ago, they did a certain amount of planting along the banks. These irises are brightening up the view on the way into the city centre.

These baby orb web spiders were in a hedge I pass on the way to the allotment. I think they must have been affected by the carbon dioxide in my breath - I know bees react to it - because they were clumped a lot more tightly, and began to scatter as soon as I took a close look.

And here's variegated Daubenton's kale flowering on the allotment. It flowers rarely, and it's propagated by cuttings, so it's interesting to have a few flowers - it's a very weak flowering stem for a brassica - a year after I planted it. It's right next to some Ragged Jack kale which is flowering like mad, so it should produce some interesting crosses.

Wet!

 Orange tip butterflies mating in a sunny spell. If this weather continues, it'll be another really bad year for flying insects.

This is more like the current norm. There's a lot of waterlogging, but this is the only plot I could see with standing water.

And the flying rats have been at my felderkraut. Brassicas are an easy meal when they're hungry, but it's the first damage I've had since that last very cold spell in February.

The bees were flying this afternoon, until a heavy hailstorm put a stop to that. I had a look at them; there's very little uncapped brood, and most of the capped brood I saw last week has hatched. The queen must have been laying like mad through the warm weather a while back, but she's done very little since it turned colder. That's no bad thing; a colony with a large broodnest in bad weather is in danger of starving. I had a train like that years ago, and every time there was a bad spell in May, a lot of brood was thrown out of the cells, since the bees were unable to feed it all. There were quite a few drones in the hive.

The broad beans are coming up, along with the first of the peas. I'v planted three varieties of leeks, and several kales and other brassicas. There's not a lot happening in this cold weather; I'm continuing to clear ground, and the pears are in flower. The plums are almost over, and the apples are starting to show a little colour.

Some pics

Coltsfoot growing in industrial wasteland by the canal.

A coot nesting on Edgbaston Reservoir

Crown imperials. They like drought and heat in summer, and this is the only place on the plot where I've ever managed to get them to grow. It's probably a little dryer in winter than the rest. They suffered badly in those two very wet years we had not long ago, but they're coming back slowly.

Trillium Kurabayashii, flowering two or three weeks earlier than usual.

A view over the site. 



The row of pines was planted when the railway was built, on the insistence of Lord Calthorpe, who owned the land, as he wouldn't let it go through without a screen.

Swarms to come

The signs of spring are all around us, like the wonders in Conan Doyle's 'Lost World'. Plum blossom is coming out, and the sycamores round the flat are in full bloom. The bees are booming, with six and a half frames of brood, and patches of capped drone brood. That's where I'd expect them to be in early May, not the end of March.

There's a noce frams of brood developing here. You can see the capped brood - the brown areas - with very few holes, and flat capping, indicating that the queen is laying fertile worker eggs, in a nice pattern. To the left, if you enlarge the pic, you can see uncapped honey, which is coming in from willow.

This one's mainly honey, with yellow, greenish or brownish pollen (depending what plant it comes from) in some cells.

With colonies so strong so early, we can expect swarming, especially if the current weather continues. I've heard one swarm report already, and I've seen bees around my empty hives, suggesting that a colony not far away may be making preparations. The interesting thing is that I pick up swarms every year, then those colonies don't often prepare to swarm out of my hives. You'd have thought a lot of swarms would be from swarmy strains, but it doesn't seem to work like that.

A lot of the swarms go on to fill the broodbox with brood at the height of the season, and that may be the key to some of it. There are many different factors which affect swarming, but one of them is space. If the queen runs out of cells to lay in, the colony usually swarms. I use 14x12 boxes, which are significantly bigger than a standard Nations, which uses 14x8 1/2 inch frames. I think some of those colonies run out of space because beekeepers are using boxes which are too small for them.

Spring has sprung

I always feel spring's arrived when I see the bees bringing in significant quantities of willow pollen. You can see the several incoming bees are quite yellow-looking, and have yellow parcels of pollen in the pollen baskets on their back legs. Nectar and honey are nothing but carbohydrate; bees get everything else from pollen, which is loaded with protein and fat. For the first time in five or six months, assuming the weather's warm enough for them to fly, they have a supply of fresh feed. They respond by feeding the queen better, causing her to lay more eggs. They have food available for the resulting larvae, and the colony soon expands, as bees begin to hatch out faster than the old ones die off.

This is the stream at the bottom of my plot, immediately after a heavy shower. Normally it's about half an inch deep at this point. After a thunderstorm, it becomes quite scary, and half the site may well be under water. I can't complain though; it's only the regular flooding which has stopped the site being built over long ago. Otherwise, it would be worth millions as building land.

Birmingham Organic Gardeners

BOG had a stall in town today; I got a white currant, a day lily and a hardy geranium. You can see my currant, which is quite large, put away at the back there on the right, while I went shopping. I'll put it in as soon as I can get to the plot, and probably prune it right back. The important thing for this year is to get it established, not to get fruit.

Planting time

I've started the first little bits of planting. Seven varities of bread bean; Crimson Flowered, Red Bristow (from the HSL), Aquadulce, Grando Violetto, Wizard, a field bean, and Red Epicure, all tp be planted together. I'm going to let them all cross, add more to the mix next year, and see what I end up with. I'm looking for somthing tasty, tough (hence the field bean), red-flowered and red-seeded. I've also put three lines of TPS (true potato seed) in at home; Skagit Magic, which is supposedly blight resistant, only I didn't have any blight to test it last year, Russian Blue, and Blue Belle. Last year I got them in mid-May, and planted then, far too late. This year they've got plenty of time to develop.

My surviving bee colony has far too much brood; four and a half frames of it. That's consistent with what I'm hearing elsewhere, and it's no doubt due to the mild winter. Trouble is, there's no way the bees are going to bring in enough food for that lot in early March. We're going to see a lot of colonies starving this spring, and those tha come through will be unusually strong. All we need then is a dry and sunny May, and there are going to be swarms all over the place. At the moment, they're bringing in a little pollen - a lot for the time of year, but not much in absolute terms - from snowdrops, blackthorn and hazel.

 The first pussy willow is showing, and it won't be long before wllow pollen predominates. It's that time of year; it's often a bit warmer, so the bees can fly for longer, and there are large trees within a few yards. With an ample supply of food for the first time since early autumn, the bees can expand the boodnest, and build up the numbers. They're still vulnerable, though. If there's a shortage of stored food, a spell of cold or wet weather can easily reduce them to starvation.

Meanwhile, the hellebores are in full bloom.