Bees and new arrivals at Nascondiglio di bacco

19 Aprile
Sorry about my recent bad blogging habits. After hoeing and pruning all the day long, I am exhausted and not up to posting. Today is the 7th day, however and it is raining, so no excuses.
I have been energetic enough to take some photos around the place as I have been busy gardening as well. I think the place is ready for Kevin and Erika as they arrive today from KC. I have known KR longer than anyone on earth except relatives, so we should have a great time over a bottle of Sassicaia and some veal steaks tonight.
Notwithstanding my stiffness in the morning, I think you know you are getting older when you can't read how many grams of fiber are in the new All Bran box without your grannies. That happened yesterday (or are they just using smaller print these days?)
We are planning on opening the pool in a couple of weeks so the covers will go away and it will be prettier to look at even if too cold to take a dip. The surrounding landscape is awash with many colors of green, yellow and red-the latter two being the prevalent weeds-I mean wildflowers. Raffaele and I have completely finished pruning the Pecorino grapevines and hoeing them all. That is 21 rows down and only 140 to go. Actually, we hired the pruning done for the red vines as we don't have time to do everything.
A confession is in order as I burned up the motor on the weedeater as we have 2 unmarked containers of gas and I used the non-mixed batch which allowed the piston to mate rather intimately with the cylinder until they became as one. 10 days to get in the parts and of course the guarantee doesn't cover malicious neglect.
We will be planting the last 1/2 hectare of vines next week I hope and also expect our sprayer to arrive, so we can treat our vines as needed with sulfur or copper if we get too much moisture. Those are the only 2 elements approved for use in a biological vineyard and the copper is limited.
The quince tree is the last to bloom this year, but wow!, we should have a bumper crop. Also, the almond trees are full this year after a 0 harvest in 2008.
I planted a new granny smith apple tree along with all the flowers as well.
Continuing this flight of ideas I am listening to Karyn Allyson (sic?) and Boko Maru on itunes... I imagine, I am the only person in Italy with the latter and one of the few the former.
Raffaele is off to Val d'Aosta in the area near Zermatt for 9 days, so I am jealous, but I had my fun in the mountains earlier. I am hoping he will bring me photos and descriptions of the ski slopes, so maybe I can finally plan a ski trip in Italy in 2009-2010.
We are getting many reservations for the summer and are ahead of last year with a bunch from Belgium which is exciting. I talked to a Belgian lady requesting a June stay and she explained they are touting Le Marche in the magazines and papers there as the undiscovered "new Tuscany". What have I been saying? I hope this is the start of a nice stream of guests from the low countries.
The pictures show the italian honeybee, a type of bumblebee which I couldn't find on google, another type of bee in 2 photos, one with his tongue sampling the lavender , a hornet, our new granny smith and kumquat trees.
dds