I taught plant propagation, soil fertility, and greenhouse management to the guests before the superintendent transferred me “outside the fence.” Memorable moments arose from both sides of the razor wire, but I will never forget one afternoon in the greenhouse when I was teaching a dozen well-tattooed tough guys in their 20s, 30s, and 40s about plant sex. The birds and the beesįor several years, I worked as a volunteer in the Washington State prison system. Most bees don’t collect a lot of nectar, so pollen is the most important thing. This Anthophora, a common digger bee, is happy with anthers that are well above the petals. One of the best-selling beginner books of all time has less than a half-page devoted to flowering plants. They don’t explain that bees need both nectar and pollen, or that flowers can be males with no nectar or females with no pollen. They don’t mention the parts of a flower, such as stamens, anthers, and nectaries. Jumping the gun, some detail the processes of marketing honey and making soap.īut nowhere do these books explain the complex codependency between bees and flowers. Some explain how to light a smoker, catch a swarm, and treat varroa, while others offer tips on honey harvest and fall management. They explain the basic difference between workers, drones, and queens, and (ever so briefly) mention seasonal fluctuations in population. The books tell you what to buy, where to put your hives, and how to install your bees. To better understand what we currently teach newbies about the connection between bees and flowers, I began leafing through my stash of beginner books. But with many of our new beekeepers emerging from a Facebook-dominated culture, you simply must explain the details. A beekeeping primer didn’t need to detail how flowers work because those farmers and dairymen had a feel for the whole botanical reproduction thing. You simply cannot keep bees without flowers, yet we’ve left plants out of the basic instruction manuals altogether or mention them only as an afterthought.īack in the day when beekeepers came from agrarian backgrounds, you could probably get away with this. Two sides of the same coinĭespite what the books don’t say, the craft of beekeeping has two fundamental dependencies: honey bees and flowers. Like a honey bee, this green Agapostemon enjoys a wide range of flower types and colors. It’s like trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the jelly - it just doesn’t work. Trying to learn beekeeping without a grounding in plant science is daunting because the two disciplines cannot be separated. Many of these new beekeepers simply do not understand the intersection between plants and their pollinators. Do they use the syrup to make it liquid?” What happened?”Īnd another, “I don’t understand how the bees make honey from pollen. We have lots, so I added my supers just as the berries began to ripen, but I got nothing. For instance, a new Pacific Northwest beekeeper said, “I learned the big honey crop is blackberries. Today, I hear confusion about plants in the questions people ask. Perhaps they didn’t call it botany or plant physiology, but they had an instinctive feel for how natural systems worked. It works because moisture levels and dust concentrations in the atmosphere affect the colors we see, and because our weather system moves from west to east, when and where we see the red makes a difference.īecause folk knowledge was common knowledge, rural beekeepers grew up knowing the basics of plant science. “Red in the morning, sailors take warning,” was a reliable predictor of foul weather, as opposed to “Red at night, sailor’s delight,” which meant tomorrow would be gorgeous. You can “prune your roses when the crocus bloom.” And, of course, you can predict a good harvest if your corn is “knee high by the Fourth of July.” “Plant potatoes when the dandelions bloom,” is an adage I still use. Many of us grew up with folk phenology handed down by the same people who instilled our love of bees. They even predicted good years and bad, fretting over rainfall, drought, and windstorms, and they knew how to read phenological signs. They understood the annual cycles of growth, bloom, seed set, and die-back, and they recognized factors that influenced plant health and productivity. 967-970.īesides their love of bees, these folks had something else in common - a working knowledge of plant life. This article first appeared in American Bee Journal, Volume 161 No.
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