Well, it has happened - granted, a few weeks ago - but we have bees. Peter, our mentor was as good as his word and he supplied us with a hive of bees. They were moved by us from a location outside Leeds, West Yorkshire, to our own location. I got stung twice - once on the arm and once on the end of my nose! That certainly makes your eyes water, I can tell you!

Tomorrow night (Tuesday 18th August 2009), Alison and I are off out to a secret location near where we live to colect our very first honey bee swarm. Our Mentor, Peter, has been looking after then for us while we were on holiday, and tomorrow we get to take them home. We’ve been on the Harrogate & Ripon Beekeepers Association course and are, unfortunately, the last people to get some bees.

Alison and I went to Harrogate on Saturday and spent the day building a couple of beehives. Alison hasn’t done any form of wood workery before and she did a really good job of putting her hive together, although her hammering technique was a tad amusing, but then again, as she’s never had to use a hammer before why should she know? Me? Well, I’m a professional (mechanic and DBA) and I managed to get a bit of mine glued and nailed into the wrong location and, I think, upside down as well!

As mentioned previously on this blog, we have had a large number of breeding frogs in our pond.Well the tadpoles have hatched and are growing well. At least, the ones that manage to stay well hidden are. :-( Those damned Koi are eating machines and there is wholesale slaughter going on in the pond at the moment. The volume of tadpoles is dwindling quite rapidly as those fat, greedy bastards (have I mentioned that I don’t like them?

Well, the frogs have almost gone. After a mass orgy of croaking all night and day (do they ever sleep?) and sex all day and night (lucky b*ggers!) they have started leaving. The pond is returning to the domain of the Koi carp (which I hate almost as much as I hate cats) and is full of spawn. This morning there were only about a dozen frogs left, a couple still paired up, but most of the rest had gone.

Coming home from our bee keeping course on Tuesday night (10th March 2009) Alison and I spotted a ghostly shape on the grass verge in the dark. Turns out to have been a live badger. We stopped (yes, it was safe to stop!) and it wandered away a few yards, paused and watched us watching it. We remained thus for about 10 seconds until it lost interest in us and wandered off into a field.

Just like last year, the mass orgy of frog sex is taking place on Alison’s birthday! We have more mating frogs that you can shake a stick at in the pond right now. Most are spawning - as they do - some already have. It’s interesting to see how the males lose interest in the females once sex has been had! One problem I have this year, lots of the frogs are getting up the pump outlet pipe and into the filtration system.

Last night Alison found the first frog of the year in our driveway. The snow that has been around for a couple of weeks now had vanished as the temperature raised itself to a heady 6 degrees C and out she came, (the frog, not Alison!) heading for the big pond. Last year, on March the 9th (Alison’s birthday), I counted over one hundred froggy heads in our pond by the front door.