Summer Solstice

There hasn't been much news from the hive. It's hot, and rainy; the jungle gets deeper and greener every day, and the bees zoom out of the hive every morning on a mission to accomplish the day's foraging before the afternoon thunderstorm. In the mornings you can watch them take off, zigzagging like sparks from a bonfire, up and over the trees, then...where? Once the rain starts, they congregate at the hive entrance; they seem dozy and cranky, like kids stuck inside too long.
Dragonflies and hummingbirds are all over the back yard these days, and some of the gladiolas I transplanted a couple months ago are blooming. There are tomatoes, surprisingly late in the year, on the Homestead vines--an indeterminate variety developed to survive Florida's summer--and at long last, the chili peppers are starting to look enthusiastic. While I was away last week the red potatoes gave up the ghost, finally, so I'll dig them up tomorrow and see what we accomplished. The sweet potatoes and calabasas are starting to look happy, too; I planted two varieties of calabasa this year, so we might get some interesting crosses.
Outside, it's a rainforest. For a change we're getting regular afternoon rains, this summer--that's how it used to be every summer, until maybe six or seven years ago. The forest is responding, every branch sprouting with resurrection fern, moss on all the stones--moss everywhere--everything, lushly green. Even when it's not raining, there's a steady patter of water droplets from the canopy.
The chickens spend their afternoons on the front porch, venturing out into the fields once the rain lets up. Their crops are perpetually stuffed full of grass seed,toadlings, grasshoppers, beetles, worms, leafhoppers, and mole crickets--they almost can't be bothered to come to the back door for kitchen scraps. We have two new additions, named (rather unfortunately) Ying and Yang; they're a breed called Black Star,which is a RIR/Barred Rock cross. They're huge, peaceable, handsome black hens, and they are still getting used to things around here. They were accustomed to living with a family full of active children, and here, obviously, they are much more left to themselves. The younger RIRs, which we refer to as "the mediums" (because we have three sub-flocks at the moment: bitty, medium, and grown), have aligned themselves with the big new ladies, while Binky seems taken aback by their sheer size, and can't decide whether they are beautiful additions to his flock or some kind of threat.
The "bitty" flock consists of the three Old English Bantams we adopted a few months ago; sadly there are two roos and one hen. The hen is prone to choosing a bit of high ground from which to watch her two husbands facing off, which they do a couple times a day in a display of incredibly cute, miniature ferocity. The three of them are amazingly perfectly camouflaged in our forest--brassy brown as a fallen leaf and greenish black as a shadow--they can disappear in a blink. They're so teeny, Binky doesn't seem to even register their presence.
There isn't much else to talk about for now. We're in the summer holding pattern of long, long, hot, really hot, rainy days; it's the time of year when--not unlike the bees--the people, dogs, and cats all crowd inside and watch the jungle grow; when I most leave the Sanctuary to itself, to the mosquitoes, the humidity, and the occasional snake, and only open the windows at night sometimes to hear the frogs going crazy down in the swamp.