This is just a quick update. Bees are Gone :-(...

I look up as I sit down to write this post and peer outside. It looks like a forest out there with green everywhere. Spring is back with full force. Who would say that just little over a month back, on April 15, we had a freak snow-storm, and I wrote down in my diary: I am dreaming of a white little Christmas...well, I do celebrate the festival of Christmas with everybody else in December. But, I think historians are in dispute over the actual birth-time of Christ. Some say that He was indeed born in December. Some say the story of the wise sages following the stars mean that He might have been born in April or May. If that's true, then I don't have to dream of a white Christmas but actually can see it, feel it and thus start celebrating the White Christmas of those historians who think He was born now :-) in April. So, here is the picture of the outside on May 15 (on April 15, there were not a single leaf on any of these trees; everything was covered in snow):

Snow indeed came on April 15. The weekend before, temperature rose to about 85 degree F(29 degree C). The morning of April 14, the temperature was about 75. Then, it started dropping as gusty wind and rain blew in. By nightfall it was a freezing 19 degree F (-7 degree C). We woke up on April 15 with thin layer of dusty-snow on everything, everywhere. The sun was up and so the snow melted fast, but the freezing temperature continued for two more days and then rose again. But freezing temperature, especially in evening and night, continued until about the last week of April. Then, within a short span of time of about two weeks, everything become green and started growing crazily. This was the first time in my life, though my life is not that long but still, that I saw snow in April with daffodils, hyacinths, primulas, crocuses and other bulbs blooming.

Spring has been trying to come here since March 20. On the first day of Spring, the weather was so warm and sunny that we worked a lot in our garden. Lots of work going on there with installation of new trellis, arches, dog-run fence, newer beds, bird-baths, digging, pruning, cleaning...and the list continues as you know. When we first got this house five years back, our backyard was just a green lawn with three evergreens at the end, some evergreens on the side, and two rose-bushes in the corner. Since then, we are trying to turn it into a our little paradise-oasis. But, it's a bad-breaking, time-taking and money-spending affair and thus going slowly.

But a lot has been done and still need to be done. Lots of new flowering plants, trees and rose-bushes got planted. I will write about them slowly throughout the summer. In the meantime, I end this post with the worry that I don't see any bees around here except one or two in a week; butterflies are also hardly coming. With spring like temperature, on and off, since March 20, I expected more buzzing but alas.....So, here are the flowers that are now blooming in my garden. With so much flowers around, bees were busy buzzing everywhere in the previous years. Did this harsh winter affect them? What's everybody experiencing about bees, especially those who faces a bitter winter last year? These are just some of the flowers that are blooming. I now have some amazing perennials and natives in the garden about which I will write later. As you see, there are so many flowers in the garden; flowers of all sorts of color, but there are no bees to be seen :-(. I am linking this post to Rambling Wood's Nature Notes.