Big Oaks, Seeps and back to school ...

Today we had a professional development day at school ... in the afternoon, I worked over an hour on the AP Biology audit which has turned out to be a lot more work than I thought it would be ...

Over the weekend and this afternoon, I went through hives, taking off supers with frames that were empty or near empty, reducing the interior volume with less bees in the hives.  I still have five hives to go.  I also feed them some sugar water in a zip-lock bags with slits cut in them.

Over the weekend, I picked up acorns from several large oak trees around Holland, KY.  Most had a circumference of over 12 feet.  One of the largest was the big Red Oak on the Rich farm near Mt. Zion.

On Saturday morning, I took a walk back of the goat field north of Holland.  Several of the Tulip Poplar trees had circumferences were over 8 feet.  The picture below is one of the smaller ones over 100 feet tall with a circumference over seven feet..

There were some beech ferns growing among hundreds of Christmas ferns.

There was some fern-like moss growing on fallen tree trunks.

Several seeps above the Chattanooga shale layer had small ferns growing from them ...

Tomorrow at school, we will pick back up some of our projects.  In Genetics, Chapter 15 questions and our fastplant lab continues.  Selected Topics in Science will be back in the computer lab to finish their Phet simulations.  Computer Programming moves on to sorting programs.

Parent-Teacher conferences will be Wednesday after school.