Nectar and Pollen Sources

An observant Central Virginia beekeeper is identifying flowering plants in his area that are useful for producing nectar and pollen. There is a great diversity of flowering plants in a temperate region like Virginia, and a number of these are important bee plants. Virginia honey bees forage prolific nectar sources: clover, black locust, basswood or linden, and tuliptree. The Appalachian Mountains support the sourwood tree, which produces nectar in the higher altitudes. From the nectar of this flowering tree, bees make the famous sourwood honey. Many of the flowering plants produce both nectar and pollen to attract honey bees. There are seven families of flowering plants that can be considered exceptionally important to the honey bees. The rose family contains almonds, apples, pears, plums, cherries, blackberries, and hawthorns. The mustard family includes spinach, turnips, kale, collards, Brussels sprouts, and rape or canola. The legume family has peanuts, soybeans, peas, beans, indigo, alfalfa, kudzu vine, and the most prolific honey plant, clover. Some legumes are trees: mimosa, redbud, Kentucky coffeetree, and black locust. The snapdragon family includes mullein and the empress tree. The composite family includes the sunflowers, dandelion, goldenrod, and many garden flowers, like the coneflower and daisy. The mint family includes spearmint, peppermint, catnip, bee balm, lemon balm, and coleus. Finally, the magnolia family includes one important tree for the honey bees, the tuliptree, also known as yellow poplar. Almost any plant in these families can be expected to provide considerable amounts of nectar and pollen.

Beekeepers can identify obscure wildflowers that they observe attracting honey bees by following local guides like Weeds of the Northeast, by Uva, Neal, and DiTomaso. One person’s weed may be a beekeeper’s important wildflower. The Hive and the Honey Bee, edited by Joe M. Graham, lists a number of bee plants according to family and identifies them as nectar or pollen sources. Today’s photo is a bumblebee collecting pollen from native wildflowers at the seven thousand foot elevation on Pike’s Peak in Colorado.

--Richard

Handling Queen Cells

Honey bees produce queens in a cell that is the size, shape, color, and texture of a peanut. Queen cells are generally described as swarm cells, which occur along the base of the frame, or supersedure cells, which are found on the sides of the frames. There is no difference in the queens that the two kinds of queen cells produce. I look at them as a gift of the hive: queens that you can use to make a colony division or create a nucleus hive to hold a spare queen for emergency replacement. If you find a frame with a single queen cell on it, simply move the entire frame to a nucleus hive along with enough frames of brood, bees, honey, and pollen to support the queen. If you find a number of queen cells on a frame, you can carefully cut the extra cells off with a pocket knife. Cut wide around the queen cell. You will probably be cutting through worker brood cells. Place a queen cell inside a plastic queen cell protector and push the protector into the side of a frame of brood in a new hive. The queen cell must be oriented vertically, just as the bees produced it. At times, when you find queen cells, it is often after you have torn them open removing the frame. You can often gently replace the beeswax and the bees will repair the cell and save the developing queen.

The quality of any queen is determined by her genetic make-up, the nutrition she receives throughout her development, how successfully she is mated, and the genetics of the drones with which she mated. To ensure that our queens receive good nutrition during queen rearing, we plant a diversity of flowers near our bee yards where queens are raised and mated. Click on the photo to see a bee collecting pollen from turnips, mustard family plants that have been grown to bloom and produce seed.

--Richard

The Mustard Family

The mustard family, Cruciferae or Brassicaceae, is one of the important families of flowering bee plants. Many of the members of the mustard family are valuable to the honey bee as a source of nectar and pollen. The mustards provide food for both the honey bee and for man. A number of the mustards are garden vegetables. Cultivated members include cabbage, Chinese cabbage, broccoli, turnip, radish, collards, kale, kohlrabi, mustard, cauliflower, horseradish, watercress, and Brussels sprouts. Rapeseed is a mustard which is often known by the name canola, which is derived from “Canada oil.” The cultivated members of the mustard family are usually grown as cool-season crops, producing vegetable greens in the fall and spring. One of the members of the mustard family, yellow rocket, often covers meadows with bright yellow blossoms in the spring. Yellow rocket is a significant source of nectar where it exists.

Today’s photo shows some purple top turnips that are growing in one of our clover fields. A benefit of growing cool-season crops like the mustards is that they require almost no care. Planted in the late summer or early fall, the small plants have very little competition from other plants. If turnip seed is planted in late August or early September, there is a good chance of the plants producing the turnips at the base of the greens in the fall before winter's freeze. Both greens and turnips are delicious table fare; many prefer them cooked together. Turnip greens, seasoned with salt and a piece of pork fat, are a staple and delicacy in the South. If the mustard family vegetable plants, like turnips, mustard, kale, or collards, are left undisturbed in the soil in the spring, the plants will bloom and then produce seed. The blooming mustards are most attractive to honey bees, and the blooms are quite valuable at the honey bee’s spring population build-up time.
--Richard