Just got out of my hives today, a beautiful September morning. After a summer of abnormally high temperatures and recently a week of unusually cold temperatures, we finally are treated to more normal September weather.

Cool nights. Crisp mornings. Heat by the middle of the day, but still very comfortable in the shade. The kind of weather that turns your thoughts toward fall with the sound of combines in the field and excitement that accompanies harvest.

The bees have received Mother Nature’s signal, too. They seemed more mellow than when I last got into the hives. They were calmer and definitely focused on business at hand, that is, building up their honey stores for winter.

That wasn’t the case in last month! Come August, there are not as many flowers blooming so food becomes scarce. On top of that, add a lingering drought to the mix, and our bees were more than grumpy.

We stole their summer’s work on August 21 (I swear we get the hottest day of the year to harvest honey supers) and then the bees got really mad. Downright pissed, in fact. It was difficult to get near those hives: these ladies were looking for trouble!

Contrast that with the bees you see in spring. They’re out after a long winter, happily buzzing from flower to flower, minding their own business. I love spring bees! I always find joy in watching these hard-working insects carry back loads of pollen in the spring; it’s one of nature’s blessings.

I am glad for September bees, too. It must be a new round of hatched bees, all with instructions from the queen to “work as hard as you can to get as much honey as you can before the weather turns cold.”

The bees have nicely cleaned up the sticky frames after we finished extracting the honey, and they’ve gone through the first round of mite treatment.

Now I’m hoping for some nice September weather and time to make gallons of syrup for the bees. Each hive gets a one-gallon bucket of 1:1 syrup, a 4-pound bag of sugar and 8 cups of water. Some beekeepers prefer a 2:1 ratio, but I’ve never used it. Hungry bees can finish the bucket in a couple days, so you ought to see my grocery cart.

But I don’t mind. We harvested a record 365 pounds of honey from just five hives this year.

Our bees have been great to us, and I do love those September bees.