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The Kitchen Table

I have bees!!!

16 years ago

We have honey bees for the first time in over 2 years. I am so excited. I have a flowering almond tree in full bloom, the flowers are covered with bees. A very good sign they are coming back. All I have seen over the past two years have been bumble bees and carpenter bees.

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Comments (7)

alisande
16 years ago
That's good to hear!!
gardenspice
16 years ago
That is a good sign. Many folks don't realize how important bees are to our food production. We have lots of bees, I think that someone around here is a beekeeper.
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I have two patches of the plain old red Bee Balm, Monarda didyma. One spot is drier and sunnier than the other, and that patch isn't doing very well. This Spring I'm going to transplant it to the backyard, where the soil is richer and not so dry. This plant is the #1 Hummingbird plant in my yard right now, although I'm planting a bunch of others they like this year, like Cardinal flower and Cypress vine, so we'll see. Monarda fistulosa is supposed to do better under drier conditions. I have the cultivar 'Claire Grace', planted last Spring, that is doing well in a dry spot, part sun. It's got lots of little shoots coming up. I am winter-sowing Agastache rupestris and a couple other Agastaches this year. They supposedly attract hummingbirds like crazy and are very drought-tolerant. I think they actually MUST have well-drained conditions, or there's no chance of them thriving or surviving the winter. You might want to check out Ipomopsis rubra - a tall native with red tubular flowers that also attracts hummingbirds and grows under very dry, sunny conditions. It's a little weedy in appearance, but pretty flowers -I plan to add it to my wildflower meadow...maybe next year.
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Dorothy try the shop vac. It took me about a month to stop them going in. I would turn it on every day watching them. I put mortar in the hole and they still drilled through. I didn't have enough in the hole, so after using the shop vac again I sprayed into the hole, put double the amount of mortar and silicone on top, I guess the silicone is sticky and works well. Just be aware if the nest is full of bees, they will want to get out somehow. Eventually I had them in my house, but they were a little dizzy as they did not have any pollen so they basically just died and went to the floor. After a week, (touch wood) I haven't seen anymore around the hole,( fireplace) and so far no more in the house. Good Luck, I know what you are going through.
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kacram
16 years ago
We have many bees (well, not now but in the spring and summer) I need to go see some pics, for honey bees. We have mason, bumble and some others that I don't know, maybe those are honey...
schoolhouse_gw
16 years ago
I love honey bees too as long as they don't swarm and nest in the siding of my old house. Sigh.
Rudebekia
16 years ago
Did they ever figure out just what was killing all the bees or at least why so many were disappearing? As I recall there was a PBS show on this, but the jury was still out as to the cause.
sheilajoyce_gw
16 years ago
We had a hive of honey bees removed from our owl box I had only recently put in our tree. In the few months that we had the box out there, they had filled it with honey and were outgrowing the box. We paid to have a bee company remove it. They said that there is no shortage of bees except on farms and orchards where the chemical sprays are killing them.
taigen_gw
16 years ago
Last year I took part in the great sunflower project that takes note of the bees. Unfortunately only one of my seeds produced a flower and it was very late in the season. Our summer last year was very washed out but it did give me more insight into the bees etc. and we sure don't have them like we used to. I will have to look and see if they are running that project again this year and give it another go.
Glad to hear yours are already showing up.

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