New Hellebores blooming in the garden!

Last Spring I purchased a Corsican Hellebore, I'd been admiring the same plant on Catherine's blog in the Pacific Northwest. Once I stumbled onto the plant I just had to have it.

Corsican Hellebore, unlike most of the other hellebores in our garden this one grows many flowers on the same stem, there will be 4-5 other flower this year. In future years it should have a lot more than this first blooming season plant.

Here are two white picotee hellebores. The upper picotee is supposed to be a double, it does barely make it, I'm not yet impressed with it, perhaps other blooms will prove it to be a winner.

The lower yellow picotee is the very first bloom from Helleborus X 'Gold Finch' purchased at Pine Knot Farms in 2010, the bloom is huge at least 4 inches, this one I really like even if it is a single. I thought this plant was lost, but it stood out and looks so yellow, not white.

In the morning we are going to the Pine Knot Farms Hellebore Festival!!

 Above is Flower Record crocus, it does very well here and it one of the biggest crocuses in our garden. The first blooms of this either a squirrel or something ate the blooms, luckily there is maybe 30 of these blooming right now.

 Above is Pickwick crocus, it goes great with Flower Record as they open about the same time, it is big also.

 Here is Tricolor crocus, surprised me by putting on a decent show and you can clearly see here this 3 year old bulb is multiplying. I recently had another blogger comment that these are squirrel food in their garden.

 These large white crocus are really full of pollen, can you see the pollen puddle?

This crocus is for Andrea on the other side of the world! I just love the way these glow, not sure of the name? I planted a Ruby Giant, but have not seen anything what I'd call ruby. So if I'm correct we have had 11-12 different crocus bloom in February, yes February usually we get lucky to have 2-3 crocuses blooming in February.

Wanted to tell you we have been seeing Eastern Painted Turtles sunning on the edges of the pond in the past week. Upland Chorus Frogs have been calling non stop, Spring Peepers are still a few calls at a time, soon we'll have intense frog concerts!  I heard a Pickerel Frog the other day.

Oh, it reached 80 degrees today. This morning I was wearing a tee shirt and put on a long sleeve shirt and were out, came right back in and removed the long sleeve shirt it was 62 degrees at 7am.

Last item, I did a varroa mite treatment on the bees today, my sticky board test had 57 mites on it in 22.5 hours, 50 in 24 hours says treatment is needed. I borrowed a billows to blow in powered sugar from a friend, but found it not covering the bees very much.  So I placed a window screen over the boxes of bees and poured on the powered sugar and used my bee brush to spread it between the frames. The way the powered sugar works is you cover the bees with it. The fine power to the mites it is like stepping on marbles, they fall to the bottom through the screen and die. The bees also clean themselves and knock off mites, and they get a little snack as well. I'll need to do this about every week for another 3 weeks or so, to reduce the varroa population in the hive.