Did you know it’s National Honeybee Day? I just found out, and if I hadn’t been looking online it would have gone unnoticed. Now that we’re beekeepers, everyday is a honeybee day! They’re even having a big awareness event today at the Portland Farmers Market.
Our honeybees have been hard at work for the last few weeks, and the honey is coming on strong! The weather has been warm and dry (except for the last two days), and even our volunteer sunflower has started to bloom. I’ve fallen so in love with this sunflower, that I plan to plant a whole row of them in the yard next summer.
But before I get too distracted talking about flowers, let’s get back to the bees.
The blackberries are blooming and the bees have been busy! It’s a good thing too, we’ve been pretty busy ourselves and haven’t been able to get into the hives as often as we did in the spring. I think we’re also starting to get the hang of this whole “bee keeping” thing and so we’re not as over-protective as we were at the beginning. When you begin to understand that it’s not about any one bee, but instead about the total organism of the hive, you trust that they know how to keep themselves going with very little human intervention.
The weather was great last week, so we figured it was time to check in on Noir (the left hive) and Gris (the right hive). From outside of the hives things look good! The bees are always on a mission and the crowding at the entrance was starting to get a little crazy, think “clouds of bees” waiting to get in, so we removed the excluder and now the bees can come and go all along the bottom entrance as oppose to just one three inch slot.
