Got Honey?

​By:  KATIE CHILDS
NORTH COUNTRY MASTER GARDENER VOLUNTEER

Yes we do! The Gardens on Golden Pond have been “Home Sweet Home” this past summer for thousands of bees! It was back on May 10th when a neighbor beekeeper agreed to set up a couple of hives on the edge of the woods near the vegetable garden/perennial beds. It has been an amazing experimental effort as the bees pollinated plants all around as well as produced an abundance of honey! A blog at the NCMGV website this past May first introduced the initial honeybee operation.

While some bees were caring for the ‘queen’ who lays eggs and the ‘drones’ mate the queen, the female ‘workers’ were extraordinarily busy - primarily guarding the hive, keeping it clean and producing honey! Also all summer long, the worker bees gathered the nectar and pollen. Some of their favorite flowers were asters, anise hyssop, cosmos, coneflowers rudbeckia, sunflowers, yarrow, and zinnias.

​The worker bees have a tiring and dangerous job laboring from sunrise to sunset with a lifespan of about six weeks. Based on their productivity, periodically additional components called ‘supers’ were added to the hives to ensure their high rise had adequate frames for construction of combs and honey yield. Each super holds ten frames where the bees create mass hexagonal prismatic wax cells to store their honey.

Labor Day weekend the beekeeper was as busy as the bees! As the photos indicate, it was time to harvest the excess honey. The process was as follows: first, the frames were removed; followed by scraping the honeycombs; third, the extraction process took place through centrifugal force in a barrel and the finale -the jars were filled with liquid gold!

Since the harvest, the bees have continued to produce more honey, which is their food source, for the winter months ahead. In October, the bees began receiving an additional sugar syrup supplement along with protein patties. Also, with a hard freeze and bitter cold fast approaching, the hives got a very techie “spaceship” look. They have been cloaked in an aluminum flexiwrap -similar to what is used in outer space - that is ¼” thick and has a R-6 value. Also a vapor board has been placed on the top of each hive along with a one inch styrofoam section on the bottom to ward off drafts. Along with all the protective layers, the thousands of bees in each hive must do their part as well. The “heater bees verses the housekeeping bees” maintain the warmth in the hives by shivering or vibrating their flight muscles, raising their body temperature thus elevating the surrounding air by several degrees. Note, it has been a common practice for some apiarists to transport their bees in the hives to warmer climates over winter, to continue pollination of other crops such as the California almond groves.

​It is a fact, nature is not an exact science. However, optimism remains for the honeybees who buzzed around the Gardens on Golden Pond to be the official greeters next Spring in search of tulips and daffodils!

For more information, please refer to wihoney.org; abfnet.org (American Bee Federation) and pollinator.org. Also plan a visit to the new Tashjian Bee and Pollinator Discovery Center at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska next year. It is the first building in a planned “farm to table” campus where the buzz is all about the bees!

“The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.”
Elizabeth Lawrence