Mid-Summer Honey Plant Challenge and Picnic

With the blackberry honey flow coming to a close, its time to look harder to see what our bees are foraging on this time of year.  Be part of the the mid-summer honey plant challenge.  Walk around your neighborhood and look for particular plants that seem to be attracting bees in large numbers.  Make a list of the three or four most interesting and bee-covered plants you come across.  If you don’t know what the plant is, take a sample and bring it to the mid-summer picnic at Philip’s house and we will all try to figure out what it is.  Identifying honey plants that are especially attractive to the bees once our blackberries stop flowering can help us design year-round beescapes to get the bees through the usual late-summer nectar dearth.

Summer is a busy time for everyone – especially beekeepers – so we are skipping the July meeting.  The next gathering of Oregon Sustainable Beekeepers will be a potluck picnic at Philip Smith’s house on Sunday August 5th and 4:00 PM.  Hope to see everyone there!