We had a wonderful time watching honey bees collecting pollen from the prettiest of flowers on our hike on Sunday.
They worked tirelessly until their leg sacks were full to bursting and they could hardly fly.
Then we followed them, hoping to find their hive. Over bushes, under trees, around a stream. It was a treasure hunt indeed.
And then, eventually, we spotted them going into a hole in a tree trunk… hundreds of them, the trunk humming with their song.
It couldn’t have been more perfect!
When we got home, we looked up bees on the computer and learned so many interesting things about them.
Gosh… they sure are important!
Kitty and Teddy agreed that these things stood out the most :
Bees fly up to 6 miles to collect pollen on each trip. We estimated that that is about 3 times what we had just hiked. Wow… the kids agreed that this is far!
They visit about 1500 flowers a day!
1 out of ever 4 bites you eat comes from something that needed bees to pollinate it.
All the worker bees you see collecting pollen are female.
1 out of every 3 honey bee colonies has died in the last 3 years. This is bad! The reasons for the dying bees are the increased use of pesticides (which we decided to never use, ever, even though we already don’t) and the fact that many of the plants we buy in the garden shops have been modified to produce less pollen and nectar… making life so much more difficult for the bees.
This loss of bees shocked us and made us decide to plant many bee-friendly plants in our garden this spring and be mindful of thanking bees when we see them.
Here are bee-friendly plants.
Let’s all do our part to help bees thrive once more.
Blessings and magic,
Donni
7 Responses
Lovely photos! I was just working on a blog post last night (to be posted soon!) reviewing the film More Than Honey and talking about how much I love bees, love to sit and watch them, and love to photograph them! It’s so meditative!
Hi Taryn, I know what you mean… I love watching how they just keep on at it… they are amazing.
I look forward to reading your post.
xo Donni
Yes, bees are truly amazing. We have been keeping bees for a couple of years now and continue to learn more about these busy workers every day.
Planting more flowers is definitely a great way to support them. Though, make sure to plant flowers in big groupings as bees have a hard time finding small individual flowers or simply won’t bother with them. Happy planting!
Oh, my… I’d love to have bees. Some of my friends have bees here in the city… so it’s totally do-able. Maybe in my future :)
xo Donni
Wonderful photos. Bees are so important and fascinating. Thank you for sharing :)
They are, Anya… they are so amazing!!
xo Donni
What beautiful photos and I appreciated all the info on bees; especially the link to bee friendly plants; we are trying to plant more of those around our urban farm.