Once you have a hive you see the world differently... every where you go you are looking for bees, and more importantly what they are attracted to... and then why. Bee's need pollen (protein) and they need nectar (carbohydrate)... they need a source of this throughout the year. Obviously there are plants that provide this throughout the season, and clearly one wants to assure a quantity of this at all times.
I'll give you an example... Mint, I hated it... it ran wild on my property before we got here and i set it eradicating it with a religious like fever. I believe i might have even gone on last year about how some mentally impaired person brought some into the community garden... a plant clearly on the list of "do not plant ... invasive species" in the garden handbook. But then I find out that mint, when it flowers in the fall is a good source of food for the bee's... my small mind opens up a bit and i change the way i see things. Was that me watering some mint that came up in my garden? ... yes it was... you see what is happening here.
In fact this whole beekeeping thing might be good for my marriage... I have been importing bee balm, and lavender and other flowering plants that i am allergic to. You see "the old me" had this opinion that if you couldn't eat the plant there was no use planting it, and my wife is kind of a "flowers are nice to look at and have around" kind of girl. Now through the bees i can see this new love of flowers... perhaps i am obsessed.
Did you know that honey from rhododendrons is poisonous? I didn't, but this is what i found out doing my research... so i set straight to work cutting down my neighbours rhododendron bush... she came rushing out of the house kind of vibrating and was cutting all over the place in animated fashion and at the time i was in the mindset that she was doing a bee dance to try and tell me in "bee language" where other rhododendrons were so we could set to work on more eradication. I figured she was wagging to the left of the sun so i tried to rub antennae with her and i set off to the left of the sun to find other offending rhododendron bushes. It turns out that wasn't the case and she seemed more pro rhododendron even after finding out about the honey. She might even be a bit mad at me even though i offered to replant her yard in mint and lavender... some people you just can't please them.
OK maybe that didn't happen, but it's the type of thoughts i have been having lately. My cousin called the other day to tell me he bought a new car and was very excited about it... I asked him if there were any bee's in it... i sensed alarm and a mild paranoia mixed with a fleeting sense that he hoped that there were no bees in it, and perhaps he should go check to be sure... it really knocked him off topic in a confused kind of way.
Honey from fuchsia is insipid i have read. Oddly enough I had always like fuchsia's... my parents had them at the cottage and the hummingbirds would come and feed on them and there were good memories... memories that i had mentioned to my wife, who this year bought two hanging baskets of fuchsia, and i went out and bought clips and chains to hang on our front porch... and now the idea of insipid honey threatens to destroy that dream. In reality I'm sure a few fuchsia flowers will not sour a honey batch... it's the thing about urban beekeeping... you get averages. The good thing about urban beekeeping is there are less pesticides in the city and a great variety of flowering plants, although i did notice some hammerhead spraying the sidewalk with round-up, and i tried a more diplomatic approach in an effort to curb this insane behaviour... it didn't work. A sick human determined to pour chemicals on his land in order to conquer the landscape to make it a more consumer driven idea of what a yard should look like is no match for logic.
My oldest daughter has now dubbed herself a "honey detective" furrowing her brow at rhododendron bushes and planting a large mass of sunflower starts. Our plan is to gorilla garden as many sunflowers in the neighbourhood as possible. Of course sunflowers are a good source of late season food for the bees. I figure if i send the kids door to door asking to plant a sunflower or 200 in somebodies yard they will get a better response... use the resources you have always.
I have a bunch of flowering onions... if you overwinter onions they will then go to seed this time of year... I always let a few go for the bees and it looks kind of nice in the garden. Interesting fact... leek flowers are purple (at least the kind i have) while red onion flowers are white... who would have known?
The other crazy amazing thing about bee's is what they accomplish with steady work. Gardening can seem overwhelming if you visit your garden infrequently in rushed bursts of time... even me who is always in the garden I find myself saying to myself "there is so much i could do.. how far do i go?". I of course am a person who sees gardening as more of a religion in a way that i can only guess religious people practice religion. Practice is a good word... a defined allotment of time in which you focus on doing the work you need to get done, and in the end you feel better and see the world in a better way. Well of course the bee's are the stalwarts of practice... it's all they do... make wax comb, fill it with brood, pollen and honey and work constantly to enhance the hive. You see what the bee's do in a week of steady work and you can't help but feel humbled by the progress. Do you know how bee's make honey? Check this ... if it was marketed as double regurgitated stinging insect serum it might not sell... but don't let the truth get in the way of a fine toast garnish.
I get an immense amount of good feeling nurturing food grown in the ground, it puts me in touch with the natural planet... my other "religious like" devotion. Hiking a mountain, walking the forest, on a canoe on a lake, standing in a river... birdwatching trips with my Dad, camping in Algonquin park and hearing the wolves howl one night. All of the special memories that are "spiritual", are nature related my whole life. So somebody asked me... Is having bees labor intensive? Because they were thinking they would like to do it if it wasn't labor intensive. Now the answer of course is Yes, it is labor intensive, like gardening is labor intensive. I would change the word "labor" to "opportunity" and the sentence takes on a whole new meaning... it turns from a negative to a positive pretty quickly. If i can find something to help give positive meaning to life, something i can practice that gives back so much in so many different ways, then labor is not the word i use... i use opportunity. In fact the other night at dinner where we fed heavily from the garden one of my daughters reminded me of the time i received notice that i got the community gardening plot. The story goes that my wife was upstairs reading stories (it was bedtime) and i started screaming and making a lot of noise... My wife sent a girl down to find out what the problem was and in fact i was just celebrating the opportunity i had been awarded for more gardening space.
Imagine if i didn't have the community garden? That's where the twins learned to bike to last summer... imagine not having that goal? Imagine not knowing all the new people i have met? I wouldn't have seen a few great films because i didn't know about them... i wouldn't have have found homes for my excess plants? There would be less victims for my sunflower population project... right... we haven't forgotten about the bees... let's not get too off topic. Life has a strange way of coming full circle... bad news can be good news if your focus on the end goal stays paramount. If something bad happens there is probably a reason, and so rather than dwell on the bad thing you can focus on the big picture to work to alter the chances of that "bad thing" happening again.
I'll leave you with a story i read a long time ago... not sure where it came from, but it helped reinforce my beliefs at a time when they were wavering:
A farmer left a gate open one night and one of his horses got out and escaped. When the neighbour heard he said "this is bad", the farmer said "we will see". The next day the horse came back with 3 wild horses, the neighbour said "this is good", the farmer said "we will see". The next day the farmers son tried to break the wild horses and was thrown to the ground breaking his leg, the neighbour said "this is bad", the farmer said "we will see". The next day the King's men cam by to collect the young men to go and fight in a far off war, and the farmers son couldn't go because he had a broken leg...
Life's decisions sometimes take a longer time to show their value, as we are seeing with the insane consequences of the money profit driven world... that's why I'll always ensconce myself with the gardeners and the beekeepers.
