Time to Thank the Bees

Reader Contribution by Betty Taylor

The bees and I have survived another season. It is late afternoon, late summer, and all the honey has been harvested and sold. It’s time to thank the bees.

I drag my lawn chair out to the end of a row of the newer hives. I settle the chair into the high grass off to the side, and watch the miracle that unfolds at the entrances. It is still 90 degrees at 6 pm, but dry and comfortable. I am immediately rewarded with the smell of warm beeswax wafting from the hives. This scent is different from the lighter, honey-sweet smell of the wax cappings that I render for candles in the honey shed. This scent is an older, richer, slightly burnt, but still pleasant smell. The same smell infuses the barn where I clean wax from old frames and store used equipment. It’s a smell that makes you want to breathe deeper to take in more of it. My adult son says he associates this smell with my farm. I associate this smell with high summer and with the beekeeper who taught me my trade.

The bees have prospered this season. Even after leaving a full shallow super of honey atop each of the established hives, each produced an average of 73 pounds of honey, in addition to each also producing at least one 3-frame nuc in the spring.

It wasn’t all good news. Thirty percent of the hives produced only enough honey to nourish themselves. I neither harvested honey from nor took frames to make new hives. I lost one hive that was queenless in early spring, before the nectar flow, and that failed to rear a new queen when given frames with eggs. But the pendulum swung well past gawd-awful and average to pretty darn good this year.

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