Counting dates on a condition

Hi everyone,

I have a range of ten cells (B4:K4), some of these cells contains dates, and other cells contains text, what I want is counting number of cells that contain dates earlier than today's date.

I actually tried the following code, but it returns zero value

Sub MyTotOfExpIDs()
Msgbox WorksheetFunction.CountIf([B4:K4], "< date")
End Sub

And when I tried the following formula, whcih shluld give as same result as VBA code, it returned an incorrect result:

=COUNTIF(B4:K4,"<TODAY()")

Can you please help me finding a solution for this problem:

Thanks a lot,