BiggestMeow's comment in the last entry mentioned our yard that sits at the bottom of a river levy....Well, that yard no longer holds any bees. Now to divulge the circumstances of vacating that yard On two occasions, we fished the bees out of a few feet of water, but this year the story had a different spin. Things about this winter were different to begin with....I'd never hauled corn syrup to the bees on a sled before. Basically the entire first round of feeding went over snow and into hive. Nothing like trudging through a couple of feet of snow to save your bees from starvation:   But things went even stranger when our usual flooding problems at the levy on the South Skunk River took a new twist. Instead of splashing through muck and water to get the bees to dry ground, we busted them out of the ice. The whole operation took place in a sloppy mess of snow, ice, and frigid water. The lesson here? Keep the bees off the floodplains!! Here you can see Phil attempting to liberate the hives without slipping into the arctic pool:   And here is the image just before we started hauling them away. Those hives are still sitting next to the east side of the house. At least this miserable winter gave me some exceptional photo opportunities