Thursday 13 – Things you can do for honeybees today!
It’s that time of year again. Time to check the hives. From what I can tell, we started the fall with five hives and one survived. ?Sigh.
No matter what anyone says, Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD is still an international issues. CCD causes full scale collapse of a healthy colony. As little as a month prior to collapse, the hive looks full of healthy bees. The queen is still there. She’s still laying eggs. They have honey and pollen. And then…. ?
The bees are dead. It’s a horrifying site – truly horrifying. Now, remember this is happening to all polinators – every variety of native bee and even bats.
Most people are still able to replace their hives with new ‘packaged’ bees. (Packaged bees are a split of a hive that spent the winter in California.) However, packaged bees don’t survive the winters because the queens aren’t aclimated to the altitude and climate.?
This year, we’ve decided to attempt to create a survivor stock of bees. I’m hoping to start the fall with two healthy hives. ?Wish me luck.
In the meantime, there are things that you can do to help support the bees in your neighborhood.
What to stop doing:
1. Leave your dandelions alone. Dandelions are fabulous early spring food for starving bees. Full of pollen and nectar a few dandelions can make a huged difference to an overwinter starved hive. We plant crocus to give our bees an extra late winter boost.
2. Stop using chemicals on your lawn.?The average household dumps hundreds of pounds of fertilizer, pesticide and weed killer on their grass. They might buy organic vegetables, but think nothing of walking bare foot on their toxic lawns. These chemicals are believed to be the leading cause of bone cancer in dogs. Try organic fertilizer and only in the spring and fall.?
3. Don’t spray your trees for pests and don’t let anyone around you do it.?One particular pesticide is believed to play a role in CCD. It is often sprayed on trees to kill off pests. The bees can’t tell the difference between pollen and this pesticide. The bees bring the pesticide into the hive until it kills off the entire colony.
4.?Stop buying Sue Bee and other commercial honey.?Commercial honey is fraught with contaminents.?
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What to plant:
5.?When possible plant bee friend plants such as butterflybushes, black eyed susans, borage, penstimen, russian sage or any of these plants.
6. Let your crocus, daffedils, iris, and tulips bloom as long as possible.?Bees hybernate over winter. These early spring plants will help set off a breeding cycle that will out breed CCD. By planting these easy to maintain plants, you can give new life to a hive.
7. Plant late fall blooming plants such as ?Mums, Asters, and Lilys.?These late blooming flowers give bees the necessary boost to make it through the winter.
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A little bit goes a long way:
8. Plan a fountain or a little water.?As the world warms, clean water becomes harder for bees to find. Just a little clean water can make the difference between a healthy hive and a non healthy hive.
9. Buy only organic, chemical free honey. ?You can find it at your local farmer’s market. If you haven’t grown to love honey, it’s very good for you. Organic unpasterized honey maintains the enzymes that are crucial to human health. Try it on toast – you’ll never look back.
10. Support your local beekeeper.?Contrary to what they said in the Bee Movie, Beekeeping is very expensive. You support of local honey helps your beekeeper continue to replace his or her
bees to get through this crisis. Right n0w, the recommendation is to replace all hardware every year – that’s $300/hive alone and doesn’t include new bees.?
11.?Ask your state to support bee research.?A few dollars go a long way. Bee Geeks, like myself, will do almost anything for their hives. It takes money to make the research really happen.?
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Why do we care about bees?
12. Bees are prehistoric creatures. Evolved over 250 million years ago, they created every flowering plant. Every. Single. One.?
13. Bees are reponsible for most of our food production. Without bees, we will no longer have food to eat.
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This is a situation where you can make a difference. At this time of year, your simple choices can make the difference between live and death for the hives in your area.?
What will you choose?
Other Thursday-13ers can be found here.
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Now I feel the urge to watch BEE MOVIE.
That food production issue is huge. I’ve seen it in my own back yard with the loss of my apricot crop.
Wow. I learned more from your post today than I did this whole week from just random daily things I do.
Thanks for enlightening me.
I have to admit, I just ripped out these mongo ugly bushes out (that attracted a ton of bees) from the front yard flower beds. BUT….I have a huge 15 x7 flowering garden that is guaranteed to attract bees and butterflies in the back yard. The gardening center I work with offered me half off the prepared gardens…so we bought two instead of the one we had planned.
We did find a local farmer’s market that had some honey.
Trying to do what we can in our little section of bluegrass
PS, I have an awesome bee pic if you ever want to use it. It is one I took last summer at my inlaws.
Good post they are SO important to so much!!
This was so helpful! I love bees and honey, and am well aware that we owe much of the world’s vegetation to them.
I will plant everything on your list that I don’t already have. Good luck with your hives, Claudia. I hope they all flourish this year.
Some great and important advice there.
My T-13
Thanks for this practical information, Claudia!
I’ve always been told to buy ‘home grown’ honey from local beekeepers for one reason….allergies. It has been proven that what the bees in your own area produce makes their honey more than likely….allergy proof for the human of the same area….being that the pollen is gathered from the same stuff humans seem allergic to….hence, the production from the local bees produces an product that helps with your OWN allergies.
My thirteen is posted. Come visit and view some of my favorite personal photos I took of them….Clydesdales that is. Happy Thursday.
I always get excited when I see a honeybee (which is even more odd since I’m allergic to most bees) because we don’t see them much around here anymore. My granddad used to keep hives, and they were fascinating.
My neighbor used to have bees and they really helped my garden. Someday, I’d like to keep bees. Maybe after my kids go to college. Happy TT!
You know I am a huge believer in supporting the bees. I will do everything I can to help keep the little buzzies going!
This weekend, it’s off to the nursery to buy lots of pollen producing flowers – allergies be damned!
Good luck with your new Queen bee project.
Great post! Great! We are in danger of killing off the bees and ourselves with them. My garden sucked because there were no bees to pollinate it last year!
I didn’t go retro this week – can you believe it? – I went topical this week – my TT :
Thirteen Ways to get your money back from those bailed out bank burglars!
Happy TT!
Thanks for #7! I’m putting in my spring plants and wanted to knew what would attract butterflies, hummingbirds and bees. Now I have a shopping list. Good luck with your hives.
I live close to Apalachicola where I can get Tupelo honey… it was even featured in Uley’s Gold.
I saw a bee this weekend on the first flowers of spring and he was so cute! I tried to take his picture but he was kind of busy
We love buying honey from our local bee keeper. I learned alot from your 13, and am going to start some bee friendly plants today.
Claudia, I’ve missed you.
Number 12 makes me want to bow down and praise the bee.
The photo looks like the bee is sitting on its butt like a person at a table being served.
Last year we visited a NC tobacco farmer turned zen gardener. He was working with his local agricultural community with an experimental bee hive, trying to learn more about why the bees are dying. His bees are healthy thus far and he thought it might be because he has things that bloom all year long and when they wake up briefly in winter they can feed on a non-chemical variety. I hope I got that right.
I also love the fact that honey does not go bad and has been found in graves of Egyptian mummies and such.
Valuable info. Thanks for sharing.
Bzzz. I love this!
Reminds me of an old article:
http://entertainment.upperdeck.com/vs/en/news/article.aspx?aid=3198
Thanks for the sweetness.
But… What about Melissa Majoria? (Obscure reference and kidding…)
Goodly list!
Also, don’t get kill bees when you see them. I know this should be something that goes without saying, but I often see people do this at public parks etc because they don’t want the bees to sting the kids on the playground.
My mom has just bought the world’s most delicious honey from the farmer’s market here in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Sorry, everyone else, but apparently the most delectable bee food is in our Annapolis Valley, because that’s where the honey came from. …mmm…
This whole Bees disappearing thing freaks me out. I’ll be sure to plant some more flowering plants this year.
Honey, I love bees!! They’re all over my peach tree and other blooming trees right now. Some great tips here!
My croci are coming up now, no fertilizers, no sprays. The water is out for the birds and the bees. It’s a bit early for the roses.
You know, I didnt know Bee’s were so important until I watched the Bee Movie…great info. Happy TT my friend and thanks for stopping by:)
You get our vote for most Interesting T13! I didn’t know any of this. I will make note of the organic/chem. free honey brands. We try to use pet safe fertilizer and don’t spray any chemicals so hopefully we’re using the right stuff. I am psyched to learn that the Black Eyed Susans are good – and we used to have lots of Irises. Bee Bombs too – those HAVE to be good, right?
Wonderful 13! I didn’t realize about Dandelions and water.
But I did know about Pesticides. All the best with your bee saving plans.
Very interesting post! I didn’t know alot of that stuff before reading. Happy TT.
Okay, I have a massive bee phobia, but I will leave my dandelions alone.
Well, looks like my garden is already pretty bee-friendly, even though we don’t have hive ourselves. Our lawns are full of dandelions, daisies and right now crocusses and tulips. My mom loves asters and lillies, so she has tons of them. We genereally don’t spray anything chemical, because my dad doesn’t believe in it. He always makes some kind of brew from stinging nettles, which he swears by for pretty much everything. LOL And we have a pond, where all summer long the bees and other insects come to drink.
Maybe I should get a hive. Looks like they would feel right at home in our garden?
I love you and your bees, Claudia! I usually buy honey at the farmer’s market but someone just told me I shouldn’t because it’s not pasteurized and so I could get sick. That didn’t sound right to me, but what do you think?
This may seem incongruous coming from me, since I am deathly allergic to bee sting and carry an epipen with me at all times, but I think your post was great and important. I am very against Chemlawn and all those sprays because they mess with animals life in serious ways. I agree with you on dandelions, too. Thanks for sharing
Oh no, just one hive made it? Poor bees. I like your back up plan for this fall though. Happy Spring, Claudia!
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A great, informative post. Now if only we could train the dog owners in my complex to keep their mutts away from the flowers. Unfortunately, since they’ve already ruined huge patches of grass, that doesn’t seem likely. : (
We were so happy on the weekend. There seems to be a lot of bees at our newer house. They were having a lovely time. I can’t remember the moment what their favourite plant was that had them so happy.