All outward signs pointed toward a bumper harvest of honey—good rains; nice cover of flowers, both wild and planted; mild temperatures—but for some reason we got only a fraction of the usual production this year.The number of monarch butterflies and their more exotic cousins also seemed to be sharply down. The only bumper crop this …
Tag: honeybee colony collapse
A killing, then a coronation
Killing the queen bee in your hive is nasty business, nearly as bad as cleaning the mess after putting the honey in jars. This little creature, about an inch long, spends a couple of years, maybe less, frenetically flitting around deep inside the hive laying thousands of eggs that engender the thousands of bees that …
What's With the Bees?
After a bumper crop of honey in October, really far more honey than we could process, eat or give away, a check of our hive by Stew and (Bee) Bob Lewis last week showed production had dropped drastically. This after a bountiful, if short, spring when the landscape was filled with yellow jarrilla and huizache …
El Rancho Santa Clara 