Honey in the making: a photo essay

Bees are working everywhere.  Please don’t spray!  Especially when a plant is blooming. And don’t use insidious granules or injections of “neonics” on trees that will continue to poison pollinators for years. 

Did you know spraying a blooming honey plant is also against the law?  Help protect the pollinators that are necessary to the majority of human food crops– not to mention the health of our ecosystems.

Bee covered in dandelion pollen

         Bee busy on butterfly lavender: they love regular lavender too

Bee sipping nectar from a bluebell: note the pollen packet on her leg.

Bees on mountain blue

Bee sipping from an English ivy bloom: photo taken in November when other nectar crops are sparse

Bee heading for a clematis flower and working it

Bees on mint blooms: one of their favorites

                                                  

Fennel is another favorite

Bee on rosemary: herb nectar helps keeps bees healthy

Love that rosemary!

Bee on boxwood:  bees work tiny closed buds to get them to open.  Bees will encourage blossoms of other plants to bloom in the same way.

When the blackberry bloom is on in May and early June, the honey flow is abundant.

Lunara blooms in early spring to bring in the bees

And bees don’t forget the forget-me-nots

These photos represent only a very small portion of the diversity of honey plants utilized by bees. For instance, there are our fruit and nut trees.   I didn’t get any pictures of bees working twenty or thirty feet in the air, but my burgeoning backyard fruit crop indicates their presence. There are also our ornamentals:  such as linden, locust, maple and poplar utliized for nectar, pollen, and propolis (the bee “antibiotic”).  They will also work single-petaled roses such as Nootka and Darwin’s Enigma and join native pollinators on mock orange and ceanothus.  Bees could compose their own plant encyclopedia– likely far more extensive than the ones humans put together!

We can’t say it too often!  Don’t poison bees that do so much for us–and don’t poison other wildlife, pets and children along with them!

These photos are protected by copyright (Madronna Holden 2013).  But feel free to link here or to use these photos with credit in any way that supports our pollinator populations.