Bear Unnecessities

  Hi everyone. Happy mid-week. It's chilly, grey and rainy  in the forecast in my area today, and supposed to be pretty wet for the next couple of days too. Well we could use the rain, although  you will see later in this post, why I wish it had been sunny today. 😏

  It's been very exciting around my house this Wednesday (or this past Wednesday, depending when you read this) morning.  It was only 10 AM as I started to write this. My day started last night about 3 AM when Pete was barking. It was not a very aggressive bark, so I lay listening to him and thought it was only a deer, raccoon, opossum or maybe even an owl in the back yard. Then he went off for a drink of water, and when he came back, his bark became extremely aggressive and if he barked at you like that, you'd be cowing and backing away slowly. It was one of those barks that makes people afraid of dogs.

  OK, time to get up, and when I did, I got half way down the stairs, and right outside the sliding back door on the deck, was a big old black bear. There was just the door glass between him and Pete. And he didn't seem very worried about Pete. 

   He did react to me though, especially when I flipped on the back light. He turned around and trundled off the deck, not in too much hurry.  He was up there because even though I wasn't sure this was the best place, I've been putting my bird feeders into the screen porch (only the door is opened at this point because of our cold spring) at night just because of these possible bear visits. 

   Luckily I was there when I was because he probably would have ripped off the screen door and had a seat in the screen porch to eat his 3 AM snack if I'd ignored the situation much longer.

   And luckily I thought to grab my phone, so I even got a few photos of him as he trundled off across the back yard.

   The "funny" part of all this was Miss Maddie. Remember she is blind. She also sleeps in bed with my husband and myself, and our room is on the second floor. I'm downstairs with Pete and the bear, and she wants to be so she hops off the bed. I hear my husband keep repeating "Wait for me before you go down the stairs." but no, she comes running down the stairs like she was a puppy and could see. Then she starts her aggressive barks, which I think the bear finds much scarier than Pete's because that's when he speeded up his movement a bit.

    In this next photo, if you look at George the bigfoot and then look slightly to the right, you might be able to make out Mr. Bear standing and waiting for the lights to go out.  He's cutting off the bottom of the 2 trees and kind of looks like a black rock in the photo. Bears are smart, and they will wait and hope you go away so they can come back again.   

   That means I waited up a bit for him to finally lumber off into the woods. 

  You can also see the bird feeder pole in this last photo which was how it looked at 3:30 AM. The only 2 feeders I didn't bring in the previous evening  were the humming bird feeder, which was now empty and the oriole jelly feeder, which was also empty. But I didn't lose either of those.

    But the pole was cracked almost all the way through so when I tried to straighten it out this morning, it broke. Luckily it's one of those feeders that comes in pieces that clip together so I think I only have to buy the bottom pole part. As some of you have read before, this seems to happen once every year or two.

   My next big worry was the bee hive which has a lot of honey in it. Luckily this bruin seems to understand the electric fence, so that was just fine.  Phew! 😓Good thing because this morning at 7 AM the post office called me to tell me my next batch of bees had arrived. I didn't need to deal with a wrecked hive and start a new hive before the rain started.

   I was totally shocked there were so few dead bees on the bottom because this package shipped last Thursday and took almost a week to get to my local post office. 

    The bees had to be put in because they can't live in the box for a long time (which with shipping their time in the box was already pushing it), so luckily the rain held off long enough for me to get them put in this morning.

    The can contains bee food to tie them over until they get into the hive.

    Once the can is removed,  I can get most of the bees out. There's always a few that want to wait and go out on their own later.

   Once the box was mostly empty, I added some food into the hive. That food will hold them over until they can make enough from their foraging. Then the top went back on the hive.

   I pushed the almost bee-free shipping box up as much as I could so it would be under the hive entrance. Then I put a tarp on the top of the hive just because these bees haven't had a chance to make the inside of the hive all toasty warm yet. With the 3 days of rain coming, it hopefully will hold in whatever heat there is.

  And now as I finish writing this at around 11:00 AM, I'm wondering if I've already done enough for the day. Maybe I can justify a lazy rainy day reading on the couch. Ha ha. 😉