The Bees are in the Beans!

[psfred]

Got a lot of activity at the entrances today, so my brother and I walked down and checked. Sure enough, my bees are busy in the soybean field just down the road, and likely in some of the others around. Yahoo, three weeks of nectar!

I'll be putting a couple new boxes on those two hives today or tomorrow.

Peter

[Peter]

Our Linden trees (basswood) came into bloom yesterday. The town nicely planted Linden all down the main streets so there are a dozen or so within 1/2 a mile of us. Smell is tremendous and the bees love them, you get close to a tree and the whole thing is buzzing. I had a look in the upper deep on the swarm I hived two weeks back and see they are filling it with some nectar so presume the Linden may be part of it. Guess there is only 4 or 5 days of bloom so will be interesting to see how much they can pack away

[hilreal]

Fred, glad to hear you're getting a bloom south of us. Our beans are drying up. What germinated is only a few inches tall and haven't changed in the last 2 weeks. Forecast doesn't look good for the next 10 days. We got an early flow from locust and basswood but they may have to eat that to stay alive until it rains.

[psfred]

I put feeders on anyway, these are two swarms I caught this spring and they are not built up to where I want them. One superseded the queen, I think, not effeciently, so had a long brood break.

We have had no rain at all to speak of for almost 8 weeks now, only 0.1" recorded at the airport for all of June. No rain in the forecast either.

Gonna be another year of high sugar bills, I think.

Peter

[Scrapfe]

No rain to speak of here. Most of our beans are late beans and are planted in either June or July. The bean field next to me was planted last week, (I think). However late beans don't (usually) produce nectar. I perfer no nectar soy beans that don't need spraying, over soy beans that produce nectar and need spraying with insecticide. A no brainer for me. I guess I better start building a couple or three new feeders, and mix up a little dab of pollen sub. Maybe the new Tropical Storm in the Gulf will help some of us.

[DJS]

Bees working soy Beans hear, mostley in morning. Wish they would have planted some more cotton around this year instead of so much corn, but they got to plant what they can make money on.