The Heartland Bee Newsletter
October 2020 (1st edition)
Photo by Jamie Tremps. Submit your favorite bee pictures to be featured here--with credit, of course!
Have your bees had a bad attitude recently? You're not alone.
It's so common that it has a name: cyclical aggression.
Here in Florida, our bees have just come out of the other side of a nectar dearth during the dog days of summer. Robbing behavior is at its peak. The heat and humidity make curing honey difficult. At the same time, food availability for carnivorous insects is dropping precipitously, making it worth it for them to risk attacking challenging prey, like bees.
So it seems reasonable that bees might be a bit grumpier than usual. However, our wild weather compounds the problem. Nectar flows stimulate swarming, but strong winds and heavy rains make for inconsistent resource availability and mating opportunities. Sudden queenlessness occurs frequently in the fall, for these reasons. A queenless hive is an unhappy hive--and without proper maintenance, they'll quickly grow honeybound.
Including weather conditions and hive attitudes in your apiary notes can help identify patterns, making it easier to solve them quickly.
Did you know?
A queen bee must eat eighty times her own weight, every day, to produce 2,000 eggs. For comparison, that's like a twelve year old eating 6,400 pounds of food.
The queen bee doesn't feed herself. Here a worker bee feeds her. Photo by David Austin
