This past weekend I attended a Fun Day for beekeepers. In order to show how bees cluster to their queen, two brave souls volunteered to let bees make bee beards on them. The speakers tied the queen of each hive in a small box under the chin of the volunteers. Then they dumped the queen’s hive on a tray under the volunteers chins. The bees clustered around the queen. This picture is the result! My books are available from Amazon.com…
Miracle of miracles, my bees made it through the terrible -20 degree temperatures this winter. They are busy gathering pollen and gearing up for warmer weather. Hopefully, this year I’ll be able to harvest some honey. I think I hear someone saying, “How did they survive such cold? Bees are so fascinating. When cold winter hits, they gather around their queen in a cluster. The warm bees move to the outer edge and the cold ones move inward. I fed…
My bees don’t have a lot of flowers to work on, so I decided to make them a wildflower garden. I tried planting some wildflower seeds I bought from the hardware store last spring. Nothing came up but weeds. Then I learned from a car salesman at work that those seeds are not indigenous to this area. He told me to buy Aromatic Aster, Showy Goldenrod, Purple Beardtongue, and Wild Bergamot seeds from www.mowildflowes.net My next project was to buy…
Are you familiar with that saying, some days you’re the dog and some days you’re the fire hydrant? That’s how I felt last Saturday. A friend and I had planned for a long time to extract honey from her hives. I haven’t gotten any from my hives this year, but she had, and I had an extractor. For 40 years I’d stored that thing in my basement in its original box. I belonged to my dad. He’d planned to reestablish…
Last Sunday night the ladies of our church met in the heat in our church garden to enjoy fellowship. We had a lady who brought her butterfly presentation and I was invited to share about bees. We enjoyed yummy desserts made from our garden produce also. These are some of the facts I shared with the women and girls: A queen lays up to 1,500 eggs a day for two to three years. She only leaves the hive once on…