Bee Swarm and More Bananas

We some amazing thing in our back yard this weekend: a bee swarm. Out of nowhere on Saturday we noticed a huge clump of bees in an oak tree in our back yard. Our immediate reaction was to just run inside (which we did). Next I thought, "How do we get rid of such a thing?" I thought of knocking the hundreds of bees right out of the tree with a stick or ball or something but I predicted that this method would only be trouble. So after a little research online, I found that bee swarms are mostly temporary. To the casual observer they look like they might be a beehive, but it turns out that the swarms go away in about a day. This morning I went out and it was still there in full glory so I took some video. However, by this afternoon all but about 3 of them were gone and they left a little honey comb behind hanging from a limb of the tree. I must say it was very cool... and educational.

Our backyard seems to be just full of new things to see and learn. If I didn't mention it already, our baby banana tree recently sprouted some baby "baby" bananas! After just a little more than a year in our backyard, it has grown more than 7 feet and spawned off about 4 other trees. Hopefully we'll be able to eat them in a month or so.

I'm sorry I don't currently have pictures of all of the cool goings on in our backyard but I've been unable to easily grab the still pictures off of our digital video recorder using Windows XP. We have a Sony Digital8 DCR-TRV510 and had no problems pulling the pictures off of the camera using Sony's PictureGear 3.2 "Lite" (came with the camera) from Windows 98/Me. Apparently Sony doesn't have an upgrade for this for XP and the right drivers don't exist for the camera's serial connection to the PC on Windows XP. If anyone has had any luck grabbing the stills from this camera on to XP please let me know, I would appreciate it. At this point, the only option I can see is to install a Win98 VM on to XP just for getting the pictures off of the camera. Sounds lame, right?