🐝 It's All About the Bees
Celebrate Pollinator Month with Homestead's Resident Beekeeper, Rosalind Bassett
Planting a diverse fragrant garden is one of the easiest ways we can help support local pollinators. Flowers developed their fragrances not for us, but for their pollinators. A flower’s scent is a signal that it is ready to be pollinated. Yes, pollination is simply about plant sex and fragrance is nature’s signal that plants are ready to reproduce! The time of day when a flower releases its scent tells you a lot about who pollinates that flower. Flowers that are most fragrant during the day are typically pollinated by butterflies, hummingbirds & of course, bees.
Homestead’s resident bee keeper, Rosalind Bassett is sharing her thoughts on bee keeping this week & the challenges facing her hives and how we can all help to support our local pollinators. Enjoy!
June is pollinator awareness month and we are celebrating pollinators at Homestead. For me, every month is pollinator month as a beekeeper. Bees face a myriad of challenges with colony collapse disorder, pesticide use, varroa mites, and mono-farming affecting their habitat and health. As a result, beekeepers have to be much more hands on these days helping bees thrive.
This month I am having to be extra vigilant with my hives as they have been trying to swarm. While inspecting the hives I am looking for queen bee cells which signify the hive is going to swarm. Hives swarm primarily because they have outgrown the hive. Once the bees have this swarming instinct it is hard to quell them from leaving. I diligently tried several hive reconfigurations to try to stop one hive from swarming until I finally conceded they had won the battle and I had to split the hive. I took the old queen with some frames of honey and brood (baby bees) and put them in a small starter hive. The old hive will go queenless until the new queen emerges and takes the reign. Below is a queen bee cell which looks like a peanut shape.
This month I am monitoring the honey production in the hive and how full the honey supers are getting. I think I might do a mini spring harvest which will yield a lighter, spring honey in contrast to the deep amber honey of fall.
Not everyone has the interest or means to keep bees. There are some easy things you can do in your garden to support these vital pollinators. When planting your garden try to plant a large amount of one type of flower. The bees practice flower fidelity only visiting one type of flower on their foraging. Planting a variety of flowers during the different seasons is also helpful. During August, most of their forage is starting to dry up. I have started planting late season sunflowers and other flowers to come up in late summer and early fall to help during the leaner months. Lastly, providing a water source in your garden is very helpful for our bees. A simple shallow bowl with rocks half submerged in water where they can drink is helpful for them during the hot months.
The bees we see in our gardens are at the ends of their lifecycle and the oldest bees in the hive. Their last job as bees is to visit your garden and pollinate. If bees sense they are going to die they try to be polite and die outside the hive. Please take good care of our bee friends. They are amazing insects and a huge key to our food supply.