Yesterday morning about 8am, I headed out to A.H.T.H. to harvest some grapes for the owner of hill, before the bees took control again. He has an arbor that’s about 100′ long, that he and his brother have been developing for a long time. His brother’s been with some friends down-state, and hasn’t been able to help with the harvest, so I volunteered. When I went out there the day before, it was sunny and almost 90º when I walked back there, but the bees beat me to it. It wasn’t so much that there were too many, they were all stoned friggin’ drunk!
In the few minutes I watched, several grapes had at least 3 honeybee’s burrowing into them; not many of them were flying, (I think there’s regulations about that in the honey industry) and a few, were passed out. Trouble was, they were passed out with their ass’s in the air. It would have been like pickin’ flea’s out of a porcupine. Yesterday, there was frost on the grass so I knew I had ‘em beat.
As I walked closer, I strained to hear the buzzing noise that was so profound the day before, and far off, I could hear one. The next step was to look over the bundles of grapes to see if there were any bee’s on them, and there were still a few with some, but not like the day before. The ones that still had bee’s on them, I’d snap off the stem and then shake it until the bee’s fell off. It worked out pretty good until I got careless and grabed a bunch without looking. THAT got my attention again and I ended up picking two pails before the critters woke up. I dropped off the grapes and headed back home go get on about my day.
I was sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee, when I realized what a nice day it was. Mark and I had planned on doing some work in the front bedroom, but remembering the noise I’d heard while picking grapes, I changed the plans. When I’d walked around the arbor to pick some hanging from a tree, the squirrels started to complain. Mark and I were out of there in 20 minutes.
We didn’t attempt to scale it, but we did hunt along it’s base. When those buggers are moving, they’re moving all over so we picked a likely spot and had a seat. Mark faced one way, and I the other and we watched for a half hour, but nothing was going on. We moved on down another 100 yards and did it again. This time Mark had one shot at a black, but it was a chancy shot at best and it dissapeared. We figured it was still too hot and we headed over to Doug’s to check the test plots.
Doug had called me in the morning and told me that our crops had been hit hard, but I never expected this. The Rape plot was gone. All I could see was the native grass’s re-establishing themselves as the dominant species. Where he’d moved the fence’s a few day’s before, it was doing just fine. Nice large, lush leaves and a few shoots of grass showing up between them. On closer inspection I could see backbone of the leaves. It looked as though the deer just reached down and stripped the vegitation clean. They still haven’t hit the Chickory, but I learned that it’s a major staple during the snow season.
The two bai…er, test plots we’re checked and there’s been some activity on the lower, and a lot on the top one. The broken tree that we sprayed doesn’t look as though anything’s touched it, and some of the corn is gone. The top one has seen a lot more activity but Partridge and Squirrels may be the culprits. More observations and subsiquent actions may be taken to allieviate that problem. Mark poured on the remainder of the spray bottle, about a pint, to the stump and more pictures were taken. While we were there we also changed the location of his habitat observation post, to one less infringing. I read somewhere where the presence of the observer, effects the observed, and we wouldn’t like that would we. Let it be a suprise.
