Sweet Peas and Honey Bees

This weekend a strong line of storms blew through our area, bringing some rain to our neck of the woods.

The ditch behind the house filled with water, along with all of our rain collection barrels.  In all we got two inches of much needed rainfall.  When it rains like this, it takes a while longer to milk the cows due to the extra clean-up and drying you must do to them.  You don't want any rainwater from their 'winter coats' dripping into the milk.

Prior to the rainfall, I was able to capture some pictures of the sugar snap peas in the garden.  They are absolutely covered in blooms.  You can see the blooms below, along with scrumptious sweet peas that I stopped to eat while snapping pictures.  You can also see a moth drinking the nectar from the sweet pea blooms.  They get their food from drinking nectar from a straw-like tube in their mouth called a proboscis.  They are attracted to the flower and they drink their fill and move on to the next one.

A moth drinking nectar from a sweet pea bloom

A close inspection of the photo below show the sweet peas forming in the pods.  We learned after harvesting these the very first time, that you don't want to just pull on the pod.  Rather, you want to hold the stem holding the pod and pull.  If you don't use that process, you'll pull the entire runner off of the trellis and risk breaking it and ruining the prospects of future harvests.


Snap peas loading up

Our moth friend has moved to another bloom for more nectar.

And then another... Easy there, fella!

I like the way the sun silhouettes the small peas in the pod.


Pass the peas, please

Hard to see it because you can only see his rear end, but the closed up pea blossom below has a honeybee inside of it.

"I know you're not open for business, yet, but I'm thirsty."

Another shot of the oddball, but beautiful sweet pea that was mixed in with my sugar snap pea seeds.

I wish I could tell you how much buzzing there was going on amongst the blooms.  The honeybees were attracted to the blooms like gossip to a beauty parlor.  I tried to get a close-up shot, but the bees were very camera shy.  The one below is about the best I could get.


Bees play a very important role in the garden

I am not a beekeeper.  I don't really have any discretionary time for handling bees.  I do like the work they do in my garden and I like even better the product of that work - Honey!  We barter some of our farm products for pints of honey from a beekeeper friend of mine.  My brother has started bee-keeping and I've asked him to be a guest blogger to show us the process of making honey.  Until then, I looked for a simple explanation of how bees make honey and found this on a Michigan State University website:  http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/073097.html

Honeybees use nectar to make honey. Nectar is almost 80% water with some complex sugars. In fact, if you have ever pulled a honeysuckle blossom out of its stem, nectar is the clear liquid that drops from the end of the blossom. In North America, bees get nectar from flowers like clovers, dandelions, berry bushes and fruit tree blossoms. They use their long, tubelike tongues like straws to suck the nectar out of the flowers and they store it in their "honey stomachs". Bees actually have two stomachs, their honey stomach which they use like a nectar backpack and their regular stomach. The honey stomach holds almost 70 mg of nectar and when full, it weighs almost as much as the bee does. Honeybees must visit between 100 and 1500 flowers in order to fill their honeystomachs.
The honeybees return to the hive and pass the nectar onto other worker bees. These bees suck the nectar from the honeybee's stomach through their mouths. These "house bees" "chew" the nectar for about half an hour. During this time, enzymes are breaking the complex sugars in the nectar into simple sugars so that it is both more digestible for the bees and less likely to be attacked by bacteria while it is stored within the hive. The bees then spread the nectar throughout the honeycombs where water evaporates from it, making it a thicker syrup. The bees make the nectar dry even faster by fanning it with their wings. Once the honey is gooey enough, the bees seal off the cell of the honeycomb with a plug of wax. The honey is stored until it is eaten. In one year, a colony of bees eats between 120 and 200 pounds of honey.

Pretty neat process, huh?  I thought the shot below was a nice one with the honey bee silhouetted against the sugar snap pea bloom.  He's drinking up the nectar, then he's off to the hive to make some delicious honey.

Flower Power!

And here is the final product that the bees were busy working on in the garden this weekend before the rains came - nice local honey.  This is some of the stockpile of bartered honey we have stored on hand in the pantry.

The Sweet Life!

The neat thing about honey that I read is that it is truly non-perishable.  I read that they found some honey in one of the Egyptian pyramids!  It will not spoil and will only crystallize. If you want it back in its liquid state, sit in in the sun for a while.  So bees are hard workers.  It is estimated that 1/3 of the human food supply depends on insect pollination.  They help us in the process of pollination and then they provide us with delicious honey - a healthy and indulgent product we all love.