The Munson Heritage Festival is to be held on October 13th and 14th. That is a Saturday and Sunday event. I have 3 weeks in which to get ready. I have to clean jars and bottle 3 kinds of honey in 4 sizes. I have Wildflower, Gallberry, and Tupelo honey, and […]

The Florida State Beekeepers Association will have its annual workshop and business meeting November 1-3 in Winter Haven, Florida. The state meeting usually has some very good speakers that talk on a level that a country fellow can understand. There will be an awards banquet as well as a beginners class. This […]

The one caste I have not talked about is the drones. They are the only ones that can go from hive to hive without worrying about being stung to death. They are just like children, everyone puts up with them.
There are over 2,000 drones per hive. They do nothing for themselves except walk […]

The workshop was held Saturday, September 15, 2007. There were between 80-100 people there. I did not get an accurate count for the people were moving around and in and out the doors. In attendance were quite a few novices and young beekeepers. Most of these are young people. […]

Sometime between the cooks and guard bees, the middle aged bees are called upon to make wax to repair cells and to build new cells. The older bees cannot make wax anymore and the newly hatched bees are not mature enough. I would guess that 2 to 4 days are spent at this job […]

The question was raised, “How long does it take house bees to graduate into Nursing?” The answer is : I don’t know. According to one source, the first 3 weeks are spent doing household chores. The last 3 weeks are spent in the field force foraging for pollen, nectar, and water. […]

The life of all honeybees starts as an egg, about the size of a comma “,” which is laid by the queen in the bottom of a wax cell in the brood area of a hive. A worker egg hatches after 3 days into a larva. Nurse bees feed it royal jelly at […]

When a new worker bee hatches from her cell, she gets a long drink of honey then, while her wings are drying, she will clean her cell and get it ready for another egg. Then she will join all the other new bees and older housekeepers and clean the hive. They will clean impurities […]

The queen’s only job is to lay eggs. From the time she is mated until the day she dies (up to 7 years), she is the sole propagator of the hive. Without her laying the eggs, the colony will die. During the Spring nectar flow, the workers only live about 6 weeks. About 2500 […]

I was asked the question, “What do bees do when it rains?” The answer is I really don’t know. But I can make an educated guess.
Bees are like any other small insect when it rains. They are about the same size of hard raindrops. If a drop of water hit a […]