I still haven’t come up with a good name for the Queen of my upcoming hive. Any good suggestions?
Tag Archives: austin
To Bee or Not to Bee
After my last post about native bees, I decided to see if I could photograph some in my garden. Today started out sunny, and there were tons of insects flying around the Carolina Jessamine which is a native vine currently blooming here in Austin.
I managed to get this picture, and it took me awhile to identify this little guy. I’m pretty sure this is a Green Orchid Bee.
I first thought it was a fly of some kind, but Google images supports my theory. I’m open to suggestions if folks think it is something else entirely.
I also managed to get a few decent shots of honey bees taking advantage of the warmer weather. Here is a honey bee with full pollen sacs.
And here is a nice bee butt shot as she is chowing down on some sweet nectar.
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Bee Dreams
I found a web site entitled Bee Dreams which has some amazing photography of bees.
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Hive Stand
So I didn’t think I was buying any more equipment, but the Dadant and Sons Catalog showed up at my door the other day, and I couldn’t resist this hive stand for 20 bucks. I was planning on just buying 4 cinder blocks to elevate my hive, but this is much better and even has legs with pest deterent trays. You can fill the trays with something like vegetable oil, and it will prevent ants and other non-flying insects from crawling up into your hive.
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Native Bees
While I am very excited about starting my honeybee colony, I would be remiss if I didn’t have at least one post on native bees here in Austin. There are hundreds of varieties of native bees in our area that each do their part in pollinating plants.
There has been a lot of emphasis on Colony Collapse Disorder affecting honey bees and their ability to pollinate commercial crops, but the real story should be how the use of chemicals and pesticides have killed a lot of the native pollinators which used to do the heavy lifting. The honey bee was not native to the United States until it was introduced from Europe so it was humans who helped create this dependency on honey bees to pollinate a lot of our food crops.
I am by no means an expert on native bees, but Texas Bee Watchers is an excellent site to learn a bit more about our native friends. It even has good links on creating a Nest Box to attract solitary bees to your garden. I also found their list of bee friendly plants to be very informative, and if you take a look, a lot of the plants are native and/or adapted plants suitable to the Texas climate. You won’t see a lot of bees on the “six packs of color” you find in your big box nurseries.
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The Home Stretch
Little more than a month away until the bees arrive! The above picture is from the class I took last summer, and I soon hope to have a hive filled with happy honey making bees.
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Bee Documentary
I watched Bees: Tales from the Hive: Nova (2000) via Netflix last night. I got into a little trouble because I did not tell my wife I was taking up a valuable space in our Netflix queue with this DVD, but luckily it is only 54 minutes long, and I was able to watch and return it in a day.
It is a good documentary as it explores the inner workings of the hive and the entire bee life cycle. It is not an educational video on how to become a beekeeper, but simply takes you through an entire 4 seasons of a beehive. The camerawork is amazing, and I still wonder how they got some of the shots inside the hive. It also appeared to be shot somewhere in Europe and the type of hive they showed was not the usual Langstroth hive as it opened from the side and not the top. I’m going to do some research to see if I can find anything about this hive setup.
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Bee Fuel Efficiency
Bees are incredible creatures able to fly miles in search of good food sources, but I never realized how efficient they were until my wife told me about a story she heard on NPR this morning. According to research done on a bee’s ability to convert honey into energy, a bee actually gets 4,704,280 miles per gallon of honey. To put that into perspective, the average distance from the earth to the moon is around 240,000 miles.
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Making Honey
A single bee will only make 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
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Good or bad?
The New York Times has an interesting article on how bees can recognize faces. This may lead to two different scenarios:
- Hey girls! It’s the nice man who gave us this nice home to live in! Leave that guy alone!
- Hey girls! It’s that mean man who steals all our honey! Get him!
Perhaps I need to start collecting fakes noses and moustaches…
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Urban Beekeeping in Austin, Texas 