Month: March 2017

Here’s something that cereal-maker giant General Mills wants you to contemplate over your morning bowl of Cheerios: Where did all the bees go and how can you help?

The Minnesota company has taken its mascot, Buzz the Bee, off all its cereal boxes in a nationwide campaign to encourage customers to plant more than a million wildflowers this year. The campaign is fashioned after a similar effort in Canada last year to increase awareness about the dwindling population of pollinators and their importance in the food system. The company claims that thirty percent of its ingredients are pollinated by bees. When customers sign up for the program, they get a free package of wildflower seeds to plant.

According to a company website about the program, General Mills plans by 2020 to host more then 3,300 acres of nectar- and pollen-rich wildflowers on farms that grow oats for their products.

“People need bees and now bees need people,” the website states, citing these well-reported facts:

• 1 in 3 bites of food we eat is made possible by bees and other pollinators
• 42% of bee colonies in the U.S. collapsed in 2015
• 70 out of the top 100 human food crops are pollinated by bees

I ordered my wildflower seeds and I am sure that three years from now my bees will love having another source of food. Habitat loss for bees and native pollinators has been huge in Iowa, as well as a host of other factors – disease and pesticides being the two biggest – that are working against our bees.

I like to see large corporations get into the act of tipping the balance in the favor of bees and pollinators. Sometimes such efforts are half-hearted and more of a diversionary tactic to distract us from real solutions to these complex problems.

This appears to be sincere, and I applaud General Mills for its commitment to pollinator awareness and protection. The more people who are aware of these issues and can work toward solutions, the better off we’ll be.

Besides, I really like seeing Buzz the Bee. He’ll be welcome on cereal boxes at my breakfast table, as soon as all the wildflowers get planted.

Thanks to the Central Iowa Beekeepers Association, I had the opportunity to hear noted beekeeper and author Michael Bush present a day-long seminar in Grimes this past January. What a treasure trove of knowledge! He said he first became fascinated with bees more than 20 years ago, and has spent hours and hours watching them, researching them and learning about the, and he’s still learning.

He advised us to do the same, that is, watch your bees.

“You want to know your bees well enough to be able to predict what you’ll find in the hive,” Bush said. “Watch them fly. Where are they coming from? Where is the most activity? What are they doing? What signs are they giving you?”

I watch my bees plenty, but they usually leave me scratching my head in confusion.
Like the other day. One of my four hives was particularly busy. Both the upper and lower entrances had bees flying in and out like little squadrons. I had given them a winter patty a couple weeks ago, so I thought I would check to see if they needed replenishing.

To my surprise, the space where the winter party had been was now filled with burr comb (comb not built inside a frame). The white new comb was simply covered in bees. These industrious bees were busy filling it with honey and some of that comb, I learned later, had newly laid eggs in the bottom of the cells.

All in the first week of March! I had no idea where they were getting the nectar to make honey, why they would be building comb this time of year when they simply needed to survive the winter, and why the queen already was laying eggs. Definitely an unexpected state of affairs!

I called Linn, my veteran beekeeping friend, and he had no idea what could be encouraging this kind of activity. None of my bee books talked about it.

That’s the kind of surprises I get when I open my hives. I guess I will have to keep a close eye on this hive, just to make sure they have enough space and enough to eat, otherwise they could be swarming in April, a situation that no beekeeper wants to face.

I do love to watch my bees. And the one thing I have learned is that my bees are ALWAYS up to something new, and ALWAYS have something new to teach me!

🐝🐝

Michael Bush is the author of “The Practical  Beekeeper,” and his web site is loaded with lots of great information.