Let me just start off by saying we wish all well in Irene’s path and hope any damage sustained is very minimal. You guys are in our thoughts and prayers!
You know that we have two beekeepers, Sherry and Melva, that brought out a number of hives this past spring. To begin with they brought out in the neighborhood of 60 hives, and have since cut it back to about 20. This is because they follow the crops fixing to bloom, and move their hives accordingly.
The first bloom the bees caught was the orange blossoms, followed by the palmetto bloom, and then the cabbage palm bloom. These are now just about finished up. The next move is to go to the Brazilian peppers.
The Brazilian pepper is an invasive shrub that is not native to Florida. This I didn’t know, and actually I thought it some type of pepper, of the vegetable variety. But this isn’t the case. But the bees will work the bloom and continue making honey, though Sherry tells me this is not table grade honey.
Anyway, our starter hive has done very well after all is said and done. If you remember, Sherry got my starter hive by splitting some of her established hives. By doing it this way, our hive had to produce its own queen.
You see, the queen begins life as a female worker larvae, but by the young worker bees feeding it an extremely rich mixture of food, called Royal Jelly, she hatches out into a queen. The hive can produce a new queen at any time one is needed by feeding any female larvae less than 48 hours old. This happened in our case.
The starter hive produced a new queen after the split, Sherry kept her queen, so ours had to make a new one. After a short period, Sherry was showing me my new queen larvae. It is considerably larger than the regular larvae, and looks kinda like a peanut.
If you’ll look at the photo below, you can see the new queen larvae just above Sherry’s gloved finger. As you can see it protrudes out from the frame and again, it looks sort of like a peanut.
After hatching out, the queen goes on her initial flight as Sherry calls it. This is when the new queen leaves the hive to fly to drone congregation areas to mate. Sometimes these new queens will fly up to 10 to 15 miles to these areas and will mate with 10 to 20 drones, then come back to the hive…or maybe not. Our first queen didn’t. She flew the coop, or hive, and never returned.
More, plus pictures and videos...
‘Ridin Out The Recession With Dub and Deb in “Miz Judi’s Kitchen’!
Note to Readers: There are a few things that Dub doesn’t know but one thing he does know is that the word ‘Riding’ (as in Riding Out the Recession) is spelled with a ‘g’ at the end. But Dub not only walks the walk, but speaks like he is: down home, true blue, and plain speakin’ country folk.
Dub and Deb are both native Floridians, live in Central Florida, and run a small business as well. They have five children, and seven grandchildren.
Both love to cook, love to laugh, grow a garden, and generally try to “aggravate” most anyone around them basically…all in good fun, of course!
