Reader, even though it snowed like crazy last night, it’s not too early to think of bees happily flying in the sun and foraging on beautiful flowers. So, in the spirit of the spring that will surely cometh, please enjoy this poster. And use it to plant something in your yard that the bees will love.
(And if you’d like to own this Hannah-Rosengren-designed poster yourself, go here. I ordered two, and they arrived within only a day or two.)
Christy’s bees died, too.
A few weeks ago, we talked about how worried we’ve been about our bees, and on the only nice day last week, Christy opened her hive to find a ball of dead bees. She had only the one hive—she got about 90 pounds of honey from it last summer. This would have been their third year. She had concerns because there were no signs that the bees were cleaning the hive…no dead bees piling up outside the entrance of the boxes. You just get this feeling in your gut that things aren’t right.
So, she’s not sure what happened to kill them all. But she has a PhD in one of the sciences…biology, maybe?…and she’s very very scientific about this stuff, so she and Max-the-bee-mentor are gonna do a little autopsy to figure it out. I asked her to include me.
I’m betting that they simply starved. All that rain we had last summer really set the bees back. They don’t forage in the rain. And if they don’t store enough food, they die. That’s my guess, anyway, because so many of us lost colonies this winter. And we’re all walking around with long faces, though we light up at the thought of our new bees arriving in April. We’re all trying it again.