Fall Dearth
I remember being told by a few beekeepers that no matter how friendly a hive may seem during a honey flow, when the winter is looming they will be quite grouchy. Both of my hives were very friendly during the summer, but recently I have to suit up to refill the entrance feeders, or I get stung. Nothing like having tens of thousands of miniature food critics that are not happy with the free service. I’m on crutches, so I am not as quick or graceful with the changing of the food as I was a few months ago.
To avoid alerting the hives to my presence when I remove the bottle, I tried leaving them a plastic bin filled with 2:1 sugar water. I placed it on a concrete block next to the hives because I didn’t want them to have to fly to far to get to it. I even put a bunch of small sticks in it so they would have a nice place to land without the risk of drowning. They never noticed it. Instead, it turned in to the most popular club for ants. It was packed with the little red bastards with a hundreds more waiting for their turn to climb up the block and in to the bowl of sugary goodness.
I made a second attempt to feed the bees and was not going to give another free meal to one of the many ant hills squatting on my property. This time, I placed a small bowl of moist sugar on the water fountain that the bees frequent. There was no way that they would not notice this and the bees would have to ford two bodies of water to reach the sugar.
My other concern was yellow jackets. They like sugar as much as bees and one vs. one wasps are tougher than bees. A strong colony of yellow jackets can invade a bee hive, kill lots of bees and rob them of their honey. When I went back out to check on the bowl of sugar a short while later, the bees found it and there was a lone yellow jacket. The honey bees politely informed the yellow jacket that the sugar had already been claimed.
I took this opportunity to try and get a few good shots of the bees in flight. It took many tries, but I did manage to get some in focus shorts of bees flying.
