(Host) By watching the honeybees in her garden, commentator Stephanie
Greene, a freelance writer who lives on her family farm in Windham
County, has made some surprising discoveries.
(Greene) It’s high
season for bees, with hot sunny weather that allows for optimal
gathering of pollen and nectar. Honeybees will not gather in the rain,
which is why hives can starve – even in summer – if their keepers are
not paying attention, and feeding them sugar water when necessary.
One
of my gardening pleasures is to look for the satisfying sight of bees
working the plants in flower. It’s great: I can goof off and watch them
work.
As always, there are revelations in store. For one thing, my bees seem to prefer weeds.
I
shouldn’t be surprised. Bees always go for the plant with the highest
sugar content first. When farmers first imported hives for the massive
pollination of orchards and large crops, they were dismayed to discover
bees ignoring the apple or apricot blossoms, only to head straight for
the dandelions.
I have yet to find a bottle proudly labeled
Dandelion Honey, even though most parts of that much vilified plant have
been used medicinally. For centuries dandelion leaves and roots have
been used for liver cleansing tonics. In fact, the Apaches so prized the
plant they traveled long distances to find it. (They should have come
to my yard.) This is the same plant we spend millions in herbicides to
eradicate.
I also wonder at the labels on jars claiming them to
be "Clover Honey". Just how do they keep the bees where they are
supposed to be? A honeybee’s range is three miles. Who has three miles
of nothing but clover?
Another thing: I’ve read it’s the white
clover that honeybees prefer, and indeed, that’s what I see my honeybees
working. Red clover I’ve only seen worked by bumblebees, because they
have the longer proboscis required to get to its nectar. So it would
seem that bees are quite able freelancers already. Hence the umbrella
term Wildflower Honey serves it well.
This spring I began to get
nervous, not seeing many honeybees in my gardens. I even worried
briefly about Colony Collapse Disorder. It was not until the Johnson’s
Blue, that ubiquitous Cranesbill perennial geranium, bloomed, that the
bees deigned to visit.
I’m probably spoiling them, but I don’t
yank my bees’ favorite weeds. If there are bees working it, the impudent
weed stays, at least during its bloom. In fact I managed to annoy the
gentleman who hayed our fields by asking him to wait a bit so the bees
could work the milkweed, and then the goldenrod.
Anyway, I’ve
often thought of putting in an extensive medicinal garden that would
yield a wildly healthy honey, justly prized and celebrated. So far so
good: the Echinacea is blooming. And happily, the bees love it.
It
turns out that both milkweed and goldenrod have been used medicinally,
while Cranesbill has historically been used as a natural astringent and
antiseptic.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Perhaps my weed honey
contains medicinal properties after all. As usual, we humans are way
behind the insects.