All the buzz in yesterday’s blog about yellowjackets got me thinking about my honeybees. Well, that, and we checked on all the colonies in our backyard last weekend.

We found some textbook-beautiful brood. If you look closely at the photo, you’ll see honey around the upper corners of the frame. The bees build comb on the frame and then use it to store pollen and honey, and the queen lays her eggs in the cells also.  In the photo, everything in the middle of the photo is capped brood — lots and lots of new bees about to be born.

New bees are good, because many hands make for light work (as a former coworker always said). But if it doesn’t rain good and long soon, the flowers offering nectar — the building block of honey — will dry up. It won’t do much good to have lots of bees if there’s nothing for them to gather and convert to honey.

This is the time of year when beekeepers help themselves to excess honey the bees have — hopefully — stored all summer. We have a pretty good idea how much honey they’ll need to get through the winter. At least, we like to think we do.

Have you seen the honeybee exhibit at the state fair?  It’s in the Hort building. You can see the differences between the queen, worker bees and drones (males) and ask beekeepers all kinds of questions, including my favorite: What can I plant next year to keep the bees and other pollinators well-fed?

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