Point of view is everything. On Monday evening I attended a pollinator meeting in Olympia. Part of the discussion centered on leafcutting bees and how gardeners often lament the damage the bees inflict on their precious plants, as in “Oh no! Look what they did to my roses!” On the flip side, bee lovers are […] Read more
One day in August I was sitting in an Adirondack chair midway between a busy bee hive and a large stand of lemon balm. I had a notebook and was trying to outline my next post. “You are so noisy, I can’t think!” I complained aloud. But I wasn’t addressing the hive, I was speaking […] Read more
I am fascinated by the amount of ouch that comes along with a bee sting. After getting stung by honey bees so often, I was amazed at how differently stings from other bees can feel. For example, the sting of an alkali bee is sharp like a pin prick, but the pain recedes immediately and […] Read more
This well-researched and cleverly assembled infographic, 21 Buzzworthy Facts, is the work of Jake Lane of LawnStarter, Inc. I especially like that it doesn’t say anything about “one-third of all the food we eat” (I’m really tired of that), it does not try to glorify CCD as the next Armageddon, nor does it try to […] Read more
Each time I read the following letter, I get a picture in my mind of the honey bee hives I used to see as a kid in rural Pennsylvania: peeling paint, rotting boards, rain-admitting gaps and holes. That was before Varroa mites and a host of other diseases, and colonies persisted for decades until the […] Read more
I firmly believe that syrup made from refined sugar cannot be changed into honey, but not everyone agrees. Bees do indeed break down sugar (sucrose) into its component parts (fructose and glucose). But that enzymatic process does not make honey, just as adding invertase to sugar syrup does not make honey. Although honey is mostly […] Read more
Adulteration of honey with sugar syrup and corn syrup has been a problem for a long time. An unscrupulous beekeeper can feed his colonies these products and extract them like honey, or he can add them later, after extraction. The financial incentive is obvious because syrup is cheap and readily available. Naturally, importers of honey […] Read more