Category: Bees
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Honey Bee On Plum Blossom
It’s nice to see the fruit trees opening up here on Whidbey Island and that the honey bees are visiting them. It’s almost time for swarm season, so I inspected the hive. No cause for concern yet. In the meantime, it is good to see the bees out collecting pollen and increasing the size of…
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Honey Bee Swarm Season
Spring heralds the beginning of the swarming season. Swarming is the colony’s way of reproducing. A bee (the queen) makes more bees but a bee belongs to a bigger entity which “they” call superorganisms. Superorganisms are comprised of lots of organisms. In our case, the bee. But superorganisms also reproduce. With the honey bee, that…
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Open, open, open!
One of my hives at a customer’s house watching over two plum trees and a pear. Waiting for them to bloom. Like being outside the store saying, “Open, open, open.”
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Winter Sugar Feeding
I prefer to allow the bees to eat their own honey – and I never take too much honey so that they don’t have enough to support themselves during the winter. But sometimes a hive doesn’t or can’t get in enough honey to get them through the winter. When this happens, I feed. Normally I…
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In The Hive
As a beekeeper, I love bees! I try to leave them alone but it is best that I know what is going on. Since we keep bees in these boxes we call hives, we aren’t maintaining them in a natural environment – but that’s OK, not everything that is natural is perfect just as not…
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The Bees and Their Queen
Being a Queen isn’t an easy thing! Pampered? Maybe. A queen bee starts out as an egg, just like any normal worker bee (all of which are females). But instead of a normal worker bee diet, she is fed large amounts of royal jelly and the worker bees enlarge her brood cell as she is…
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Capping The Honey
A comb of capped honey is a beautiful thing! The various colors – and flavors of honey made from various Whidbey grown nectar sources produces a wonderful rainbow of honey colored hues. From perfectly clear to almost black. Around here, honey from blackberry nectar is the most predominant. Other times the honey is a mixture…