Tuesday, April 11, 2006

What's All The Buzz About???

Did you think that this post was going to be about the "Bride to be?" Well, I suppose it could have been, but really I had something else in mind.


Check out the bees!!! My dearest friend, Rene'e, has bees!!! I remember when she got her first shipment of bee stuff in the mail. She ripped open the shipment and proudly modeled her new bee attire. Anyway she set up the hive and got some bees. Did you know that they are sold by the pound? Imagine a pound of bees. Hmm....



I was wondering the other day... what do bees do in the winter? So I asked the expert... She tells me the following: "They stay here. They kinda hibernate however still active but very slowly. They have to eat all winter so you have to leave those 2 suppers from the picture full of honey for them to live off of. The queen starts in February laying a few eggs and it takes about 25 days for the egg to hatch. The new hatchling becomes a nurse bee for the other eggs while the nurse bees that took care of it, get their wings and become worker bees. The egg can become a drone, which does not work or anything of value except breed the queen. In the winter the hive will kill all of the drones so they do not eat honey because they are not needed because the queen stops laying about November. In the winter the hive goes from about 40,000 bees to around 20,000. They have been collecting pollen off of the trees for weeks now. I will get honey this year. They were a split off of another hive and it was a very late split so I did not get any honey last year. They just made enough to support themselves and that was it."

I wonder how much honey those bees will produce this year? Interesting stuff. How's that for educational? And... thanks Rene'e for letting me share these be-utiful pictures with friends and family.

Note: click on the pictures to get a closer look.

4 comments:

Jemit said...

Hey! Thanks Renee..great pictures!
It just occurred to me:
How can you tell the nurse bees from the other bees?


Give up?


They are the ones in the itty bitty nurse caps! hehehe... sorry, I couldn't resist.

Jane said...

Do the bees tend to go to the same trees or do they just go everywhere? Does the honey chnge tate if they go to different types of trees. Ex. IF they go to locust trees will the honey taste different than if they just go to apple trees?

Wendy said...

Very cool J! Is she planning to sell her honey or is this just a hobby?...or Both perhaps? Hey how about posting us something about how Keiths 1st day went?

Jthemilker said...

I believe for now it is just for her personal use, but maybe in the future if she has a lot she might sell some. Who knows?

More on Keith - coming right up!