Sunday Art and Bees

     Hi everyone. Happy Sunday to you. I hope you're having a wonderful weekend so far.

    Today I am sharing a journal page for Gillena's Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They? at Art Journal Journey. I will also be linking  up this page to Nicole's  Sunday in the Art Room  and Gillena's Sunday Smiles .    Plus since I've used various types of media, I will be linking  up to Creative Artiste Mixed Media Challenge Blog which this month is #125 and always has a theme of Anything Goes.  

   My page today is more true for last Sunday's weather than for today, but I was thinking of the quote "April showers bring May flowers" when I created this page.

   I started with an umbrella stencil and some water color markers. Then I used watercolor paints to make the colored sky over them. I like how watercolor paint took away the sharpness of the umbrella images.

   Next I took a crackle stamp and stamped it along the bottom of the page because I needed some ground to base my other images on.

   I painted the tree tops with acrylic paints and used a Sharpie to create the trunks.  They may not look like trees here in New Hampshire in April,  but someplace in April you already have green leaves. Probably more places than not  already have green leaves. 😏

    Then I took an older TH die as well as a small stack of colored cardstock. This  is one of those thick chunky dies Sizix used to make a lot of, not the small metal frame dies that are more popular now, so I could cut a big stack of colored house shaped pieces at once.  I assembled  3 of those images together to make my house. 

    On white paper I used a stencil and traced the square shapes that would become the windows. I cut them out, glued them down and drew in the details.   I also outlined the house to give it more definition on my page. I then took a raindrop stamp (Impression Obsession) and some dark blue ink and stamped  raindrops all over my page.

    The flowers in the bottom windows are actually each a piece from some cloth trim that I clipped apart and colored in the center. I drew in a stem on each. I also added a punch-out picket fence from a 49 and Market image set.  To finish the page,  I stamped the eye in the middle and colored it in. I also die cut the umbrella and stamped the details. Then I used a quote from the same Hero Arts set that the eye and the umbrella  image came from to finish this page. 

   The other day it was one of our warmest days so far. The hubby and I took the bee winter enclosure apart. Boy were there bees out and about.  Here's the enclosure partially apart. It had a roof and another side wall on it which are missing in this photo.

   There were so many bees going in and out. At one point there was a cloud of them in front of the entrance.

    Once the enclosure was off I opened up the top and took a peek inside. There were a lot of bees on some of the left over winter food. I had really stuffed the hive with sugar patties and also pollen/protein patties in the fall. You can see where they have eaten away at the edges over the winter.

    I didn't do a deep dive into the hive this time because the bees were pretty wound up with us down there taking down the winter enclosure and changing their environment. But I will take a deep dive into the hive soon.  However, I can report that although they were curious about us and what we were doing, they were not aggressive and no one was stung.   😏 Of course we weren't nervous and just ignored them so they just went along with their own business as we were with ours.

    I left the bags of half decayed garden leaves under the base to block any spring wind.  But other than that, here's the hive now.

   I'm really excited that with the very long, very cold and snowy winter we had the bees actually made it. 👍😀❤

    In another month my next batch of bees will arrive so hopefully this year I'll have 2 hives. I have tried this before, and never had any luck, so we'll see what happens.

   Have a great rest of your weekend and start to the new week.