Feasting After the Winter Fast

Today we had hoped to do our first hive inspection. Our friend that sold us our apiary was supposed to come down to step us through it. But the weather has not cooperated. Today it only reached about 60 degrees. None the less, the girls were quite active. Very active, in fact.

With all the rain of the past couple of weeks, the grass has really grown so we decided to spend the morning mowing and weed eating. We cleaned up around the apiary, and when we turned off the mower and weed eater we noticed a very loud buzzing. We looked over at the apiary and saw a line of black. The bees had a flight path going and the workers were very busy gathering pollen from the dogwood and redbud trees that are in full bloom. We walked down to the flight path and stood on the edge of it and watch for quite a while. It was really awesome. We have six hives - and each hive has at the very least about 10,000 bees. And most of them were out collecting pollen. It was really a sight to behold.

I didn't have my camera with me, so I didn't get a picture. We went back down later in the afternoon, and while they were not quite so active, they were still out and about. We got a few pictures and I put a couple up on The Bee Buzz website.

The fact that our girls are so busy is a good sign. There must be plenty of little babies to feed for them to be so interested in gathering pollen. Hopefully it will be warm enough next weekend to inspect the hives. I am hoping to locate the queen in at least one of the hives. I'll be sure to take some pictures.

Bee happy!
Penny