Our Colony of Bees

We had a colony of honeybees that lived in a column on our side porch.  We've discussed them many times here.  My wife loves bees, but not located right by the side entrance to our home where most visitors enter.  It's just not very hospitable, she says, to have a swarm of bees greeting you.  Of course she's right, but while the bees were there, we never had a problem with door-to-door solicitation. 

The bees packed up their bags and moved out two years ago.  I used a jack to support the roof while I pulled the column out and carefully scrubbed out the remaining hive and honey.  It smelled like mead (fermented honey), so we fed it all to the chickens.  Believe it or not they loved it.  They laid a record amount of eggs in the next few days.  I put the column back in place and (at my wife's suggestion), I put caulk at the top of the column to block their entry.  The problem was that I didn't finish the job.  I was waiting for the line of caulk to dry before applying more on top and...  The bees moved back in.  This summer our road-tripping bees moved out again.

I've missed them, but they are still around...  somewhere.  This Saturday we walked through the garden and the bee activity was CRAZY!  The luffa gourds were blooming in massive fashion and the bees were busy as... well, bees.  Check out the two bees in the flower in the foreground and the two bees in the flower in the background.

But the luffa gourds weren't the only things blooming.  The merliton squash were flowering and the huge yellow flowers were powerfully attracting the bees.  There are 3 in the flower below:

It was an astonishingly gorgeous day.  I'm no beekeeper, but I think the bees are using this last opportunity of good weather to gather nectar to make honey to eat on during the winter season that will soon be here.  Of course we don't have harsh winters here in the coastal gulf south, but at some point, there's not much blooming, so the bees have to make their food now.

As I was trying to get as close as I could to the flowers without being stung, a fourth bee landed on the flower.  They were buzzing loudly in my ears and all around the luffas and merlitons, so I decided I would back slowly away so the bees could go to work.

Despite the bees leaving our column, I'm happy that they haven't left the neighborhood.  They've probably moved their colony into a hollow tree somewhere.  That's fine with me.  It is a win-win situation.  Tricia is happy with them out of close proximity of our door and the bees are still nearby so that they can pollinate our garden.  Everyone's happy!

That Smell from the Backyard

If you have ever taken a family vacation in a vehicle, you know what I'm talking about when I mention "the smell from the backseat."  No, today we're talking about the smell from the backyard and it is the antithesis of the smell from the backseat. This is the time when all the citrus trees are blooming and the fragrance is heavenly.  Seriously.  Our backyard (where most of our citrus trees are planted) smells like heaven must smell.  In fact, In This Previous Post I listed orange blossoms as one of my favorites.

Those creamy white flowers open and the cool Spring breeze picks the scent up and carries it around and it wafts into your nose where your olfactory receptors translates the scent to your brain as a GOOD thing.  We have navel orange trees, tangerine trees, and satsuma trees.  This Spring we aim to get a grapefruit tree, a lemon tree and a lime tree to add to our home orchard.  I've been told that lemon blossoms smell the best, but honestly, I can't tell them apart.  They all just smell good.  I took a few pictures on Saturday morning of the trees in full bloom.

The dew was heavy this morning.  In this shot you can see a baby navel orange right in the center of the photo.  Of course not every fruit will set.  Over the course of the Spring and Summer, the plant will drop off the fruit that it can't sustain.  We'll also lose some over the year to birds and wind, but we've been pleased with the production from our trees and we've consumed gallons of fresh squeezed orange and tangerine juice and have made a fantastic Orange-Olive Oil Cake (I know that sounds strange, but it is delicious).  We've also made orange curd which goes great on biscuits or pancakes.

A baby navel orange

Just look at the amount of blooms on this tree - one on top of the other!

Hearkening back to botany class in college or biology class in high school (or the "Reproduction Song" from Grease 2), you can see all the parts of the flower. Remember the stamen, the pistil, the anther and filament?

The aroma of a flower is great for humans to enjoy, but their primary purpose is to attract pollinators like bees.  It's sort of like when you get home from work and you open the door and the smell of gumbo or roast or fresh bread or any number of great dishes draws you to the kitchen.  Well, that's exactly what the flower is doing. It's attracting bees, butterflies, beetles, etc. to help pollinate.  The nectar and pollen rewards the bees for doing the job of transferring pollen, so that reproduction takes place.  

Once the flower has been pollinated, it emits less fragrance so that the pollinators can be directed to those flowers that haven't been pollinated yet.

While I was standing by the trees, bees were buzzing back and forth, getting their work done.  No doubt these are the bees that live in our column.  Not long after these flowers fade, the bees will have plenty of flowers in the garden to keep them busy, especially the big yellow squash blossoms.  They tend to like those.

A Busy Bee

A beekeeper friend of mine always likes to remind me that when you see honey advertised as "Organic Honey," it is a gimmick.  Or if you see a sign that says, "Orange Blossom Honey" or "Pure Clover Honey," is is misleading.  When I asked him why, he told me that bees travel for miles - (1- 6 miles!) to find a nectar source. It is for that reason that it is next to impossible for the honey to be guaranteed to be organic or guaranteed to be honey from only one type of flower.  The beekeeper can't control where his or her bees go.  Interesting.  I had never thought about that. As the bee in the photo above was working hard, it reminded me that I needed to get to work.

The Squash Blooms

In 1977 I was eleven years old and there was a very popular song that played on the radio by the Commodores, called "Easy Like Sunday Morning."  It's such a smooth song and seems far too happy to be a song about breaking up!  Sunday mornings are easy - and happy.  I think I've explained that on weekends, we sleep a little later and normally go out and milk the cows and goat at around 7:30 prior to washing up and going to church.

On workdays, we're going out in the dark and you really miss a lot of the sights and sounds of the new day. On Sunday mornings I get a chance to see the sun as it is filtering through the trees from the eastern horizon. The breeze is cool and the lighting is perfect.  I'll normally carry my camera to capture anything that might jump out at me.  This Sunday, the blooms on all of the squash were opening up wide, as if to call me to stop what I'm doing and observe the splendor that I miss on other mornings.  The blooms open up wide in the morning and close at night.  You can see that the ants have made their way to the inside of this squash flower.  There must be something sweet in the flower that is attracting the ants.

Ants in the Flower

But ants aren't the only thing that these flowers attract.  Can you see what's in the middle of this one?  A little blurry, I know.

Let me see if I can zoom in a little bit.  Aha!  A honeybee.  If you look closely he's got sticky pollen stuck all over his legs and under-carriage and tail.  He's liking this flower and he's probably one of the guys that live in the column by our side door.  I appreciate all of his hard work in pollinating the vegetables in the garden and he's precisely the reason I don't have someone come remove the colony of bees from our side door.  Maybe I should call them our "columny" of bees?  I stood out in the squash patch for a while watching the bees fly from flower to flower doin' work.

Pollinating Honeybees

There are male squash flowers and female squash flowers.  The way you tell them apart is the female flowers have a small, enlarged part at the base of the flower that will become the fruit of the squash plant.  Can you see it in the photo below?

Female Squash Flower

The male flower is a more showy flower that is on a longer, very straight stalk than the female flower.  It does not form fruit.  Can you see the difference in the male flower below from the female flower above?

Male Squash Flower

Although I've never tried them, I hear that you can pick the male flowers and stuff them with cheese and fry them.  I'm gonna try this.  Since they don't produce fruit, you're not losing anything by picking them.  Just make sure to leave enough male flowers for the honeybees to collect the pollen from the male flowers and go to the female flowers to fertilize them.  If you pick all the male blooms for frying, you won't have any squash.

From what I see in our garden, there are many more male flowers than female ones. These blooms are as pretty as anything you'll see in a fancy flower arrangement. One thing you want to be careful with when growing squash is harvesting.  Squash grow quickly and I find they are best when young - both for yellow squash and zucchini. Yellow squash should be picked when pale yellow.  Sometimes we don't harvest as often as we should and they get overripe and turn dark yellow and hard.  I hate when that happens.  Once they start flowering, it's best to stroll through the squash patch and harvest every day.

Bright Yellow Blooms

The brilliant yellow blooms are as bright as the sunshine and as long as the bees do their job, we'll have plenty of squash to saute in butter, grill with butter and garlic, and make cheesy, buttery casseroles with.  If you go back through the pictures, you can spot baby squash in most of them, including one at the seven o'clock position in the picture above.

How is Corn Formed?

Fresh sweet corn is a treat indeed.  I am not kidding when I say you can peel back the husk, remove the silk (and any worms) and eat the sweet corn raw - right off the cob - in the garden and throw the cob in the compost pile when you're done.  I've done it and it is delicious! 

We grow a couple different varieties of heirloom sweet corn - Stowell's Evergreen and Country Gentleman.  So, how is corn formed?  Well, corn is a very interesting plant.  It is the only grain crop to have separate male and female flowering mechanisms.  Mechanism is probably a poor choice of word, but I think you know what I mean. 

The tassel, shown below, is the male part of the corn plant. 


The male part of the corn flower, the tassel, with pollen hanging off of it

The female part of the corn plant is the ear shoot.  You can see it below:

The female part of the corn flower - the ear shoot.

Here's how it happens.  The flowering stage of corn is when the tassels shed pollen and the ear shoots show silk.  The tassel will begin to shed pollen after the dew dries off, which is between 9 and 11 in the morning, during a process that lasts about a week. 

The grains of pollen are housed in antlers.  You can see them in my first picture above.  Each antler has numerous pollen grains.  The antlers open and the pollen grains will drift out and be carried by the wind for a distance of up to 50 feet.

The silks of the ear shoot (the female part) have a sticky substance on them that catch pollen released by the male tassel.  The pollen will then go down the pollen tube and come into contact with the ovule.  Do you remember this now from high school biology or the song "Reproduction" in the movie Grease 2?

Since the tassel is on the top of the corn plant and the ear shoot/silks are beneath it, fertilization takes place easily.  The neat thing to think about as you look at the silks in the photo below, is that each silk strand is connected to a kernel of corn on the cob!  Wow!



Future corn on the cob

When the silk begins to turn brown, it is harvest time.  We're all looking forward to that!


Country Gentleman corn

We've already discussed some problems that can occur growing corn and I've shown you the damage caused by Nellie, our Nubian Dairy Goat.  Tomorrow I'll show you another problem that you can experience when growing corn. 

The Flight (or ride) of the Honeybee

We don't watch much television over at our house, but about a year ago, we watched a very interesting documentary about honeybees.  I'm interested in bees.  I don't really have time to do any beekeeping with everything else going on, but I certainly realize the importance of bees to the garden.  We need pollination and that is where bees come in.  You might click on this link: PBS: Flight of the Honeybee to watch a little bit of the documentary.  It is only two minutes and 15 seconds long.

As you watch the clip, it will show how thousands of colonies of bees are trucked across the country to perform pollination in the almond orchards of California and then they are loaded up and taken to Georgia (peaches, I presume?) and then they are trucked to Pennsylvania to pollinate apples and then on up to Maine to pollinate blueberries.  I think that's how the term 'busy as a bee' came about.  In all, these bees travel 8,000 miles a year on the back of an 18 wheeler!  The documentary shows a map that traces their movement across our nation and they are trucked right through our area.  I remember thinking to myself, I'm on I-10 a lot and I've never seen an 18 wheeler carrying bees.  Well, I can't say that anymore. 

The other afternoon heading home, I was approaching a truck with a strange net or curtain covering up what appeared to be white boxes.  

What is on the back of that truck?

As I got nearer to the truck, it hit me.  A bee trucker!  I made a bee-line for the truck (sorry, couldn't resist!) and snapped this photo:


Honeybee truckers

If you look at the top right portion of the net at the end of the truck, you'll see a dark patch.  As I got closer you could see that those are bees swarmed in a pile.  In fact there were bees all over the back of the semi and you could see bees flying off of the truck.  The curtain or net keeps a lot of them in, but I'm sure they lose quite a bit down the road.  This is heading east on I-10, so I'll bet these are heading to Georgia for peaches and then up the east coast for apples and blueberries.  How cool is that?

I googled to learn about trucking honeybees.  It is dangerous work.  A few interesting facts about bee truckers:

• Drivers earn $3 per mile or more!
• It is a short bee-trucking season,
• You load at night since bees gather pollen and nectar during daylight,
• You drive all day and don't stop.  Gas station operators don't like customers swarmed by bees at the pumps.  (So how do you use the restroom?  Serious question.  Maybe I don't want to know!)
• You must water bees down in hot climates.  They generate lots of heat and die if they're too hot.
• Count on getting stung driving bees.  Truckers average 4 stings per trip.  Oh, carry Benadryl and make sure you're not allergic to bees or the job could be your last.
• Drive carefully!  You're carrying active swarms of millions or billions of bees.  Bee safe.

Back on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, our bees are local (not trucked in) and mostly wild.  I do have a buddy who provides our family with delicious Cajun Honey, though.  With everything blooming, I figured I'd walk around and take some pictures of the blooming fruit trees and see if I could spot some bees working:


A blooming pear tree

But I didn't see any bees.  Uh oh.  Will I need to truck in some bees?  I hope not.  So I went to check out the peach trees that are blooming.  At first I didn't see it when I snapped the picture, but look to the left of the flower.  A bee zooming to the flower, caught in the act of pollinating peaches!  How about that!


Making a beeline for the peach blossom

Below you can see the bee on the peach flower doing his job.  Thankfully, I won't need the services of the bee truckers this Summer to ensure that I have peaches to make homemade peach cobbler with homemade ice cream!

Pollinating the Peaches

Time for me to buzz off.  Have a fantastic day!