Rushton Farm is the Bee's Knees

The honey bees pollinate each flower, carefully tip toeing into its bud, pausing for a second and flitting on to the next. There is a sense of precise beauty in their task and manner. They stop to collect pollen but do not linger. Sometimes crawling through the bud, other times hopping from one landing to the next, a dutiful messenger. The bees know what to look for, carrying out mother nature’s call. Honey bees are important pollinators. While the Diva cucumbers that we planted this week can self-pollinate because they have male and female parts, this crop is the exception.

Recently, we watched as Noah transferred a swarm from a tree to one of the bee boxes. Some of the drones adopted a defensive position when being transferred to the box, raising their abdomens up. At this moment, their scent gland releases pheromones, an Ethaline-based chemical that smells like bananas!  

Each honey super makes 20 pounds of honey. There are three or four honey supers per colony. The average colony creates a surplus of 50 pounds of honey to go through the winter. Bees will distill nectar in honey for the winter. They use honey as a source of carbohydrates and pollen as their source of protein. A feeding of sugar syrup in the fall helps keep the bees on a steady food supply.

So how do bees collect all this honey? The bees have a 3 mile flight radius and around a million flowers produce one ounce of honey. But with tens of thousands of worker bees flying at once, this number appears less daunting, especially since the queen bee lays hundreds of eggs per day. Only the worker bees collect honey, not the drones. The females do most of the work! However, the drones play an important role as keepers of the genetic make-up of the hive. If the hive is destroyed, the drones will preserve the identity of their particular hive.

How does Rushton Farm support a bee population? Among other crops and flowers, we recently planted 600 wildflowers. Wildflower planting is important because the variety of flowers attracts birds, butterflies, bugs, and other wildlife. The farm also relies on the bees to pollinate the crops. Without honey bees, the beautiful harvest below would not take place.