Our Little Sugar Factory
(Page 4 of 5)
March/April 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
For quite some time - from the middle of April when the bees arrived until the first honey flow in June - I fed the bees a mixture of sugar and water. This is fed by the bee feeder which holds an inverted Mason jar with its zinc top perforated.
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After the clover blossoms, the first real honey flow is on and the bees make their own honey. You'd think it might be smart not to get your bees until the honey flow started so you wouldn't need to feed them sugar-water. But the reverse is true. Although 15,000 bees sound like a lot of bees, they're just the nucleus of the hive. A strong hive builds up to three or four times this size. A few days after your bees arrive, the queen should begin producing eggs - at the rate of 2,000-3,000 a day. These eggs are attended by the 15,000 bees and the eggs begin to hatch 16 to 18 days later. So if you get your bees in April your colony should be built up to a fair size when the first honey flow starts in June.
For the first two or three months after our bees arrived the only help we had was from our books. I well remember one line in a book that proved comforting again and again- "The amateur is apt to err by giving the bees too much attention." So whenever I was in doubt about doing this or that I didn't do it.
This system worked fine until one evening when I arrived on the 6:42, Mrs. R. said, "Well, a phenomenon of nature took place today - "
I didn't like the way she said it. "What do you mean?"
"You guess," she replied.
"Jackie has started to talk."
"No."
"One of the geese laid a golden egg."
"No - your bees have swarmed."
Sure enough, in our back yard way at the top of the highest tree was a huge swarm of bees. My wife said she'd heard them come out of the hive around noon - they sounded like a squadron of high-flying airplanes, and after flying around a bit they'd clustered at the top of the tree.
It so happened that very morning a fellow commuter had told me about a neighbor of his, a Mr. Whitehead, who was an expert bee-keeper. All I knew about swarming was that bees don't usually stay around long after they swarm - sometimes only a half-hour. So I telephoned Mr. Whitehead.
Mr. Whitehead calmed me down - told me he'd lend me another hive. Then said that I should take a ladder, climb the tree, cut the branch on which the bees clustered, take it down and hang the bees on a clothes-line overnight. All this I did - incidentally without getting stung. The cluster was a foot in diameter and three feet long.
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