I'm often asked what the bees are doing in the winter. Do they hibernate? Not really. When it is very cold, below about 50 degrees, they form a cluster in the hive to keep the queen, any brood, and themselves warm.

On warm days the bees fly out to gather water and pollen. They also drag out dead bees and debris and take "cleansing flights" to poop! 

They have been busy gathering pollen most of the winter here in Middle Tennessee. As early as late January and surely by February, they are gathering Elm, Maple and Red Cedar pollen. What do they do with all this pollen? It's protein that they feed to the larva before they are capped over with wax to undergo their metamorphosis into an adult honeybee.The bee in the picture is gathering red pollen form the humble little henbit plant, which also flowers in the late winter. Check out the pollen on her head and on the pollen sacks on her back legs! This time of year, the queen is very busy laying eggs and building up the population in the hive for when the spring nectar flow starts.

Nectar flow begins with the full flowering of spring. THAT is what we beekeepers are waiting for with great anticipation. The bees use the nectar to make honey for food and for energy. And of course we will be hoping that conditions are right and they can make enough for us too!

If the purpose of children is to keep parents humble, the purpose of bees is to keep beekeepers on their knees, face deep in a huge slice of humble pie!

I am beginning my eighth bees season, and although I'd like to launch this site and this blog with rosy reports of high success ( and could have done last year), this year will be a challenge. I'm at about 50% hive losses in mid-March. My surviving hives look fantastic, however, and I will use this year to start new hives and to rebuild. My neighbors and the Columbia Tennessee Farmers Fresh Market will be well supplied from my survivor hives in 2013.

So what went wrong? It all started last June. We experienced an extremely early spring and then a drought in the month of June--absolutely no rainfall here at Persimmon Ridge in Middle Tennessee. For the bees, the early bloom with no late freeze meant a gangbuster spring for honey production. For the first time ever, I harvested honey in April that measured just over 17% humidity (that's a good thing in beek lingo). I averaged 80 pounds of honey per hive, which also is very good these days with all the things that can and do go wrong with bees. Sunny, dry days were good for flower production and allowed the bees ample time to collect nectar, so 2012 was a very good honey year despite the drought. For the first time, I broke even financially and then went on to make a little money last year.

But a funny thing happened because of the drought. Flower production ceased and so did nectar gathering. The bees had made a good spring crop but the drought and the end of bloom signaled them to conserve resources in the hive. Normally, each fall, the worker bees, which are all female, kick the drones (males) out of the hive. Drones do not do any useful work for the hive other than mate with the queen. They must be tended and fed until they are needed for this very vital endeavor. Like Black Widow spider males, once mating is accomplished they die--mid-air, their genitalia ripped away by the mated queen. For the drones who fail to mate, come fall, the girls are ruthless in turning the freeloaders out! Well, the drought made the bees think fall was neigh and they kicked those bad boys out a little too early last year!

In summer and fall when the old queens in some of the hives were reaching the end of their days, the bees did what they always do and made new queens. But, alas, the boys had been banished and the new queens went unmated! Slow death to the hive. Hind sight is a great teacher. Had I known what was going on at the time, I could have ordered new mated queens from some other part of the country not effected by the drought. Of course that has its own complications that I will address in a later post.

The bottom line is that bee farming is like any other type of farming--it's always some damn thing!