Food for the bees

By Christine Tailer
HCP columnist

It has been cold the past few weeks, very cold. On the few warm days that the afternoon sun did shine down on the beehives, and the bees did venture out to fly, I was worried. I had not seen any sign of creek wildflowers; yet the bees were out, hungry and thirsty, after the long winter.

Quite simply, they were in search of food – but there was none.

I walked along the row of hives, gently tilting them forward to see how light they felt, to feel how much honey the colonies still had stored within. I quickly knew that three of the 13 colonies I had battened down for the winter, were now as light as feathers. There was not a single sign of bee life within each of the three.

The other 10 felt hives seemed to be fairly heavy and seemed to be in good shape, but still, I was worried. Winter had lingered.

I looked out across the upper field. No sign of wildflowers. Almost two weeks had passed since the first day of spring, and the days were definitely getting longer. My calendar told me that the season was changing, but our creek world did not.

Then this past weekend the weather warmed, for just one day. The sun shone down on the cold wet ground and the mud dried up. Finally I would be able to get outside and weed the raised beds.

Greg dug the wheelbarrow out from the back of the barn, and armed with my metal rake, trusty trowel, and the three-pronged, hand-held cultivator that my mother had given me, I sat down by the side of the asparagus bed, and began to pull weeds.

The sun shone down all around me and seemed to bathe me with bold freshness. I felt its warmth through my sweatshirt. Every now and then I would pause just to soak in the sun-drenched day around me, or perhaps, more honestly, I was resting my winter muscles that had began to ache with a warmth of their own.

A few hours later and the 28-foot asparagus bed was weed free. I moved on to the strawberry bed, prying, scraping, and pulling at the weeds.

And then I heard a familiar gentle buzz that filled not only my ears, but my heart as well. I looked up as a forager bee flew past my shoulder and settled on a small white flowering weed just outside of the raised bed. I watched as she delicately brushed the yellow pollen into the sacks on her hind legs.

She soon left that little flower and headed over to a tiny blue flower with a purple rimmed white center. She gathered that miniature flower's white pollen and then buzzed off into the early afternoon of the day.

I smiled. I now knew that the creek valley could feed the overwintered bees. These flowers were so very small that I had not even see them as I stood. I had to be down on the ground, and as I looked out across the fields on my knees, I could clearly see them, and as I looked closer, I could see the bees flitting from flower to flower, and gathering up their pollen.

I knew that once back in the hive, this little bee would carefully pack the pollen into a cell that was close to the brood chamber. The nursery bees would then use the high-protein pollen to feed this year's brood.

I knew that one day in the early spring, the nursery bees would mix some of this pollen with a special enzyme that only they secrete, and that they would feed this special mixture of royal jelly to a particularly healthy larva that the old queen had laid low on the brood frame. I knew that as the old queen grew older still, and perhaps even stopped laying brood, or died, or flew off with half the hive in a swarm, that this one special larva would grow larger than her sisters, and that in 16 days she would chew her way through the wax capping at the end of her six-sided cell and emerge as the hive's new queen.

I had spent the warm day weeding the raised asparagus and strawberry beds, and it certainly felt good at the end of the day to see the results of my work, but really my heart was warmed, not by the sun, or the work, but because I knew that there was food for the bees.

Christine Tailer is an attorney and former city dweller who moved several years ago, with her husband, Greg, to an off-grid farm in south-central Ohio. Visit them on the web at straightcreekvalleyfarm.com.