I purchased a new hive of bees this spring, set them up in my garden and they have been doing well this summer or so I thought. I have been checking their honey super, the box on top of the hive that would normally be harvested in the fall, but as of early August there was no honey in the super. Talking with another beekeeper over this past weekend, she said that her bees didn't have any in her super either, so she said she was going to start feeding them again. Usually, you only need to feed the bees over the winter to make sure they have enough food to make it through the cold weather, but I figured I would try feeding my bees as well. So, I put out two-pint jar feeders on Sunday and within three hours they were empty. So, when I went to refill them, I took out quart jars to replace the pint-sized jars. There were hundreds of bees just waiting for me to put out more food, it seems they were quite hungry. There are plenty of flowers around, but I guess because of the crazy hot or rainy weather we have had lately the flowers are not producing the amount of nectar they would under normal weather conditions. My hummingbirds have been the same way, they empty their feeders daily, although to be fair we do have more hummingbirds coming to our yard than ever before. Back to the bees though, Sunday and Monday they emptied the feeders twice in a day. By Tuesday things seem to have settled down, and the bees are a lot calmer. Last week while weed whacking around the garden, Vicki got stung, and it was probably because the bees were under stress. Remember earlier this summer when I wrote about a beekeeper with aggressive bees because of a critter scratching at their hive? When bees get stressed, they become more aggressive and, in my case, they were trying to tell me something. Now that the feeders are out, they have calmed down and hopefully within a couple of weeks I will be able to see some honey going into the super.

Now the reason for the food shortage is most likely caused by flowers that have been stressed by the hot weather. When the weather gets extremely hot for long periods of time both pollen and nectar are reduced as a way of dealing with the heat. Pollen is particularly sensitive to heat and can be reduced by up to fifty percent per flower. Not only is the quantity of pollen effected but the quality of the pollen can be affected as well, changing the nutritional value of the pollen to the bees. Nectar is water and energy intensive to produce, so stressed plants conserve resources by secreting less of it. Moderately stressed plants will produce roughly forty percent less nectar, but highly stressed plants in drought conditions can produce ninety percent less nectar. I am still a novice beekeeper and talking to others that have been doing it for a long time I learn something new all the time. I knew plants could get stressed, but I never put two and two together that my bees would be so affected by plant stress when there are so many flowers out there. For the bees looking at my flowerbed, it was like me looking at a buffet that was only stocked with celery.