I’m sitting in front of the woodstove and the snow is falling. So goes spring! Yesterday, was windy but warm and sunny and the honeybees were doing the best that they could to gather pollen from early blooming trees and flowers. I could not resist to, yet again, try to get the perfect shot of the blue pollen that the bees gather from the tiny Siberian Squill.
At our Chester County Beekeepers meeting last night, we had a speaker talking to us about bee nutrition. The bees need the protein that comes in the form of pollen as well as the sugar in nectar. The pollen is not eaten directly. It is carried into the hive on the bodies of the foraging bees. It is mixed with saliva and nectar and packed into the cells as bee bread. The recipe is slightly fermented with lactobacillus which comes from the gut of the bees. That fermentation process makes the food more stable and resistant to pathogens. It, also, assists in breaking down the cell walls of the pollen to make it more digestible. I’m sharing a link from an amazing article about bee bread coming from Nordic Food Lab. Such creative minds! The young worker bees eat the bee bread so that they can produce royal jelly from glands in their head. That royal jelly is critical in feeding the young larvae in the brood. Without this nutrition, the hive produces weak bees and begins to function poorly. Our hives are producing lots of worker bees already.
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