Category: Bees

So you found a BIG ball of bees hanging around, now what? Well first, if it is in the Memphis, TN area send us an email using the form below.

Now here is why there is a BIG ball of bees…

Occasionally a hive of bees needs to move out and find a new home, sometimes this is because a new queen was hatched, or because something happened to their old home to make it undesirable. The bees eat their fill of the honey stored in the hive and then the female workers, male drones, and the queen all fly away to find a new home, but where? Along the way they stop and ball up in a tree or bush while scouts are sent out to look for a new home, the swarm usually only rests for 8 to 48 hours before moving on.

In the wild, swarms are usually a good thing, it is one way that bees multiply the number of hives, but in urban areas, they can be a problem when the bee find a new home in a place they are not welcome such as under the siding of a house. So this is why it is best to call us or another beekeeper, we will safely remove the bees for free and relocate them to a new, safe home on one of our farms where they will live happily ever after.

So you may have seen the hashtag #SaveTheBees on Facebook or Twitter, or heard elsewhere some information regarding the need to protect bees and you are wondering what it is all about, well here is the breakdown.

The bees are dying! In fact according to beeinformed.org between April 2014 and April 2015, reporting beekeepers (a total of 398,247 hives) lost 42.1% of their hives in the one year period! Besides the impact on the supply of honey, this also means that unless beekeepers continue to split hive to increase the number, bees will be in a dire situation in just a few years.

So why are the bees dying? It is now believed that the primary reason is our mono-culture farming methods, that is the planting of just one crop over large areas of the land. Farmers also used to let the spring weeds such as chickweed (Stellaria media), henbit (Lamium amplexicaule), and buttercup (Ranunculus) grow then plow it under a few weeks before planting. However, the current practice is to spray glyphosate and kill all plants on the land early in the spring. Besides removing a large quantity of the early spring food from the bees it also denies them much-needed variety in their diet. Bees require 10 amino acids to survive, but most plans only provide 2 or 3. This is why it is essential for bees to have a variety of flowers within range of the hive.

So what can you do? Plant native wild flower mixes, and if you are going to spray your yard for weeds or bugs do it in the evening when the bees have returned to the hive. Below is a list of suppliers for native wildflower seeds.

Roundstoneseeds.com
Honey Bee Specialty Mix
Southern Pollinator Mix (Dry to Medium Soil)
Southern Pollinator Mix (Medium to Wet Soil)
Southern Butterfly and Hummingbird Mix
Americanmeadows.com
Honey Bee Wildflower Seed Mix
Pollinator Wildflower Seed Mix
Ohioprairienursery.com
Pollinator Blend
Sainfoinseed.com
Sainfoin Grass Seed

There are several ways to feed bees during the winter months, both naturally and artificially. You can leave honey on the hives for the bees to eat, but selling honey is how we pay for keeping the bees and buying new equipment. So we at MisBeeHayVin choose to feed the bees sugar syrup, and there are several options here. Normally we feed them a 1:1 sugar to water syrup all winter and additionally supplement with a pollen substitute for vitamins in the spring, but this year we are trying something new… We are feeding our bees 1:1 inverted sugar syrup.

Normal table sugar is comprised of sucrose, a complex disaccharide, while the nectar that bees harvest and convert into honey is comprised of about 80% simple sugars or monosaccharides such as fructose and glucose. The good news is that table sugar is made up of a fructose and a glucose molecule chained together; if we break them apart, then we have a simple sugar to feed the bees. Simple sugars are easier for bees to digest and use for energy during the cold winter days.

The way to break them apart is pretty simple. We use a simple recipe of 1 cup sugar, 3/4 cup water, 1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar mixed together and brought to a low boil. You keep it boiling for 20 to 30 minutes and then let it cool and you are ready to feed some bees!

People have told me that they have to throw out their old honey because it has gone bad, usually during the winter. STOP, I tell them! It is almost impossible for good honey to go bad, but it is possible for honey to dry out over time and then crystalize when it gets cool, but it is still not bad. When honey crystallizes you simply need to add a teaspoon of water to the jar and then heat the honey to around 100 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit and mix in the water, problem solved! Note, if you are worried about keeping the probiotics intact then do not heat above 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now there is one case where honey can go “bad” and that is where green honey, watery honey that was removed from the hive too soon (or you added too much water to), can begin to ferment; but this does not mean that it is bad, it just means that it has turned into some form of mead (honey wine/beer).

For those of you who are still skeptical, 3000-year-old honey has been found in Egyptian Pyramids and it was still perfectly edible.

FUN FACT, Bees must visit approximately 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey, meaning one hive of 60,000 bees will fly an average of 55,000 miles to produce it. That is 93,700 flowers per tablespoon of honey, remember that the next time you are enjoying delicious honey!