Today’s Run: 4 miles<\/p>\n
It is that time of year. \u00a0Time to tuck the bees away for the Winter.<\/p>\n
Winter is a dicey time to be a honey bee. \u00a0Especially in the South. \u00a0Up North, you feed them up and insulate the hives and close the door, so to speak. \u00a0Kinda like God closing the door on the ark.<\/p>\n
Here in the South it is a little more\u00a0problematic. \u00a0Honey bees will fly when it is 50-55 degrees\u00a0Fahrenheit. \u00a0That weather is a large portion of our Winter. \u00a0“No problem!”, you say.\u00a0Well, actually, yes problem. \u00a0The bees will fly but there is nothing in bloom on which they can forage.<\/p>\n
You see, a honey bee will fly, on the average, of two miles trying to find flowers. \u00a0So, all Winter, they are flying two miles and coming back empty handed. \u00a0They are using up a lot of energy (think: \u00a0stored up honey) doing all that flying and depleting the excess stores. \u00a0That leaves nothing for the other bees to eat for the remainder of the season.<\/p>\n
So, what does a bee keeper do? \u00a0You end up feeding the bees all Winter! \u00a0They need a 50\/50 feed of cane sugar and water. \u00a0Kind of like humming bird feed. With the escalating price of sugar (and everything else for that matter) it gets a little expensive.<\/p>\n
This Winter we are trying something new-for us new-not new for the industry new. \u00a0We have ordered “bee patties”. \u00a0These are like sheets of a\u00a0molasses type\u00a0substance\u00a0that you lay on top of the inside of the hive. \u00a0It is a pretty powerful sweetening and the bees are really supposed to go for it. \u00a0Let’s hope so! \u00a0Bees are known to starve to death and or freeze to death trying to survive Winter’s challenges. \u00a0That really would be sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today’s Run: 4 miles It is that time of year. \u00a0Time to tuck the bees away for the Winter. Winter is a dicey time to be a honey bee. \u00a0Especially in the South. \u00a0Up North, you feed them up and insulate the hives and close the door, so to speak. \u00a0Kinda like God closing the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,6,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":808,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/TM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}