#16. What the bees are eating

Turnip flowers, over-wintered leeks, azaleas, Daphne's butt (right background)

It is hard to believe, even harder to convey, the thrill of watching bees from my backyard hives visiting flowers in my own backyard.  And I thought I might be alone with my obsessive bee-watching, but then I saw a post on our bee class message board the other day from one of my classmates.  She was voicing her frustration about not seeing bees on the flowers in her own yard.  Where were they going, she wondered?  They were not on her dandelions, cherry blossoms, or blueberries.  They were flying, and coming back to the hive with pollen, but she never saw them foraging.  

Until a couple of days ago, I had the same experience.  I finally did track some bees to my neighbor's giant, native cherry tree.  And I counted 3 bees on my espaliered pear and that was very exciting.  But still, that was 3 bees.  Then the bees found my flowering turnips.  I had planted turnips last spring.  I quite like turnips, especially baby turnips.  But these turnips were just gross.  Gnarly, thick-skinned, cracked, fibrous and tough.  I didn't get rid of them because I liked the turnip greens they provided.  I left them in the ground over the winter - partly out of laziness, and partly out of my 'vegetable over-wintering experiment' (more about that in a future post).  And, indeed, the turnips started producing greens very early this spring.  And then they quickly bolted to seed.  The acid yellow flowers are very much like the oilseed rape that covers vast swaths of the English countryside where I lived many years ago.  The bees are having such a good time with the turnips that I will plant a patch behind the hives this year so that they can have a good supply next spring.      

Bee foraging in a turnip flower.  Look closely and you can see a yellow ball of pollen on her thigh.  
(Who knew it would be so hard to photograph a foraging b?  They move a lot, & my cellphone camera kind of sucks. )

Then there are the tree peonies.  I have always love my tree peonies.  So much so, in fact, that I have dragged the poor things with me every time I've moved house.  They started their life in Palo Alto, CA in 1998.  When I sold that house in 2000 the peonies were just settling in, but I couldn't bear to leave them behind.  So they went with me to my next home in Menlo Park, CA, and then to Atherton, CA.  Eventually, when the time was right for me to make Montauk my permanent home, they made their way across the country with me in the back of a pick-up.  That spring, the peonies started blooming during the road trip, and every evening I'd climb in the back of the truck, cut a flower and bring it into whatever roadside hostelry I'd selected for the night.  Their heady perfume and huge crepe-paper petals - the flowers measure 11 inches across! - added an absurdly festive air to the dingy motel rooms I became so accustomed to.

But never have I loved this plant so much as I do today.  Multiple flowers unfurled late this morning, their sweet scent inviting the bees into the yellow mop of pollen-covered stamens.  The bees cannot contain themselves; they're rolling around, and diving in, and seemingly enjoying some sort of drunken euphoria.  They've probably never encountered so much pollen in one place before.  

I'm so happy that I didn't leave this magical plant behind.  It was meant to settle here, at The End, making the bees and me deliriously happy.  

Bees frolicking wildly in the abundant pollen

I had bee class last night in Riverhead.  Even though it was drizzly, we still met in the bee yard an hour before class and Ray worked about 4 of the hives.  Despite the bad weather, the bees were pretty cooperative.

I had not been feeling too good about my bees.  Even though they appear active and happy, they just don't seem as if they are growing their numbers quickly enough to cope with the nectar flow and honey production that begins next month.  When I checked my hives before heading to class, I was disappointed that not much progress had been made in expanding their nest area into the frames I'd provided.  In each hive, the activity is largely confined to the frames that arrived with the original nukes.  Of course there is a lot of free comb being built in the empty space underneath those frames, so maybe they have doubled the comb in the month they've been here.  It is hard for me to know if they should be drawing and filling comb faster than they are.  The queens, of course, are the real unknown quantity.  Have they been properly mated?  Are they laying enough?  I will have to go in and pull all the individual frames and try to assess the brood patterns.  Up until quite recently, I didn't know if I was looking at capped brood or capped honey.  As I said in one of my early posts, the learning curve is steep.  After last night's class, though, I think I have a better idea of what I should be looking for and I also have a plan for manipulating the frames to encourage more comb-drawing, and maybe even more egg-laying from her highnesses.  We'll see if I can pull it off...