It is 3 C, 37 F here this morning. Pretty cold, but not freezing, the snow is melting, but still have about 4 inches I would say. I looked out at the bees yesterday, we had a little sun come through, but there was no activity. I always worry if they are alive or not. I did see quite a few out on the snow, dead, but I know that is the summer bees that decided to head out and not die in the hive. I cleared off the bottomboard (ya, I still have the solid bottomboard) of the dead bees and took off the reducers and removed any dead ones that didn't make it out of the front of the hive and were stuck behind the reducer. Always a sad sight to see the little girls with not a speck of life. The bottomboards were quite damp, but that will dry I am sure, there is a notch in the inner cover so I know that they have good ventilation.
Mick, that is awful about the amount of forest fires that are still going on. I looked at the map and it is a sorry thing for sure. Where does it stop with the fires eh? Sad.
We live in a climate that I will give an example of. In the summer we generally have very beautiful and hot weather, well, I call it hot. It averages about 23-27 C (73-80 F) during the day, not generally getting too much hotter, but when the sun goes down, the temperature reduces drastically, probably by at least 6 degrees or so. It is particularly cooler where we live outside the city, compared to say right in the little city we live 6 km away from. We live on the border of that ravine with bushes and trees, this keeps the night air nice and cool. There is not too often in the summer a night where it is too hot to sleep, I am grateful for this. In the summer nights I keep our bedroom patio doors open and the breeze blows in, keeps our room very cool, we also have skylights in our kitchen that open up, summertime they are open continually, and the skylights draw the cool evening air in throughout the house. These skylights actually create a wind that you can feel through the patio doors and my kitchen remains reasonably cool. I keep the window open above the sink in summer and between this window, open doors, open skylight, our house rarely is unbearable hot.
I always plant the matthiola bicornis (evening scented stock) on our bedroom patio. The tiny little flowers open at dusk and emit an incredibly intoxicating fragrance all night long. Once you have experienced the fragrance of the night stocks, you will always have these as a night flower in your gardens. they are wonderful to plant anywhere time is spent outdoors in the evenings.
the bees enjoy the flowers even though they are closed during the day. I always see them investigating these pretty little mauve flowers. Now the night flying insects love them too, I imagine they help to make the fragrance drift even harder. The picture was taken late last summer. Hope you enjoy this. Great day. Cindi