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.