Update on my bees in the water meter vault problem. Some women beekeeper said she would take the hive but then never showed up so it looks like its up to me. I hate to kill the bees but it looks like I have no choice. Out of curiosity I would like to salvage the honey and bees wax if possible without contaiminating them with poison. Some ideas I had. 1. Starve them out by blocking the entrance and waiting. But on another website some women said a bee has been traped behind her window shade for a week and is still alive, and thats without food or water, so the bees in the water meter vault probably have enough honey stored to hold out for quite a while, but I don't know if they need water too. That women beekeeper said she thought it would take five days for them to die if I just plugged the hole. 2. I was thinking about sticking the end of my unlite propane torch in the hole and filling the chamber with propane gas, maybe that would asphixiate them without poisoning the honey. 3, Another idea would be to stick a funnel in the opening and pouring ammonia or chlorox into the vault and hope the fumes would kill them. 4. Maybe get brave and put on two or three pairs of pants and a couple of sweatshirts and a heavy coat and gloves and put a mosquito net over my head and try opening up the cover and pull everything out myself and then put mothballs in the chamber to keep them from coming back. 5. Or forget trying to salvage the honey and bees wax and just get a can of wasp killer and empty it into the hole or use that sevin dust someone recommended. 6. Or last choice, put on all the protective stuff, open the chamber at night, and then stick a garden hose in it and flood the chamber, and hope they leave and don't come back and hope they don't sting me or anyone else the next day. 7. Any ideas or recommendations would be appreciated.

Dorothy, I have been watching your county on the drought maps and had noticed your usual waterfall of rain had stopped falling. At least you probably have good, residual soil moisture a few inches down which is great for the trees, although it doesn't do much for the more shallow-rooted plants, does it? Recession and drought together. Perhaps we are about to relive the 1930s. Doesn't that sound depressing? My dad told me that they lived on what they could grow during those horrible years, and about all they had to eat was red beans and corn....corn bread, corn meal mush, etc. At least they had food though. And, for the rest of his life, one of his favorite meals was red beans and corn bread and he ate it at least once a week. Jessaka, Y'all are not supposed to have drought up there is lush and lovely Tahlequah! It isn't fun, is it. I am sure you are watering enough. Your plants ought to be fine on 1 to 2" of irrigation a week. If you want to measure how much moisture you're giving them, and if you are using sprinklers, just set empty, clean cat food or tuna cans around the yard (you only need a couple) and turn on the sprinkler. Once the cans have an inch of water in them, you can turn off the sprinkler, or empty the cans and refill them again. Most winters, I only water my landscape if we're getting less than 1" of rain per month. However, because our drier than average conditions are in their 18th month here, I am trying to give the landscape area around the house 1" a week to make up for all the moisture that didn't fall in 2008. Y'all, this drought is starting to worry me. Last time it was this dry, even my native pasture grasses and forbs died and it took a long time for them to make a comback. Some of the pasture land around us where cows actually graze was so overgrazed in 2006 that it really hasn't even recovered well yet--the pastures are thin and patchy and now they're overgrazed again. I'm glad we don't have cows because, if we did, we wouldn't have anything growing for them to eat. The deepening of the drought really concerns me. Our ponds have never stayed dried through the whole winter before...even in 05-06, there was rain in Sept.-Oct. 2005 that kept water in the ponds for part of the fall and winter. This is the first time they've gone through the whole fall/winter empty. One still has a foot or so of water but it is very stagnant and yucky looking. The wild ducks are swimming on it every day though. Dawn

We didn't have a pool at our old house, but we had a small pond and anytime we would BBQ or try to eat outside the flies were out of control - disgusting, crawling and biting us. We bought a Rescue! Disposable fly trap at Lowes and it worked MAGIC. This is a plastic baggie filled with some horrifically stinky powder with a yellow plastic hanger piece on it. You cut the plastic bag where it shows, add water to it and hang it (we used zip ties or florist wire) far enough away OUTSIDE that you don't smell it. It attracts every fly in the neighborhood. For example, we put ours on the far back of our yard (our property T'd into the neighbor's, so our far backyard on our right was his far front on his right, and trying to be neighborly we didn't want to hang it close to his doors/windows). Anyway, it worked fantastic, we would top the water off if it evaporated before the plastic was filled with fly corpses. When it's full, I'd wear one plastic grocery sack like a glove and disconnect it and throw it in another grocery sack, then double bag it in my "glove" and tie it off and throw away on trash day. Don't throw it out before trash day because it can leak or attract more flies to your garbage can. The yellow-jacket version of this trap doesn't work well at all, IMHO, but I couldn't have been more pleased with the fly trap. Look for it on Lowe's website and read the reviews.

A few more updates.. Within the last couple of days, two sapodilla seeds have sprouted, and just today, I saw that two of the Peruvian apple cacti had sprouted, but they were right behind the plant tag, and I didn't see them until moving the tag. I've also got some white pitaya (dragon fruit) seedlings that have been sprouting over the last week or so. I'd all but gave up on many of these things, but I guess there is some hope for things that haven't sprouted so far. Still hoping for some A. Reticulata, A. Squamosa, Mexican cream guavas, purple star apple, blackberry jam fruit, phalsa berries, and jujubes that I'd recently planted (after cracking the shell and soaking in hot water for several days, with several water changes) from a seedling tree I had. So far, I've also had 4 out of the 7 chestnut seeds sprout. So, the final number that will have sprouted will be between 4 and 7. I'll probably propagate them in larger numbers next season, as long as I can verify the type and where they were grown. If nothing else, I could use them as rootstock for grafting. Lastly, I planted out the new unframed no-till (back to Eden) raised bed with two cassava plants and five sweet potato plants. I'll probably go back in after all of this rain and flooding and fill in the area with peanuts as well. It has a higher sand content than any of my other beds.