The Buzz Newsletter

May 2005

 

 

Page 9

May Flowers

The old nursery rhyme says March Winds and April Showers bring forth May Flowers. It must be true as there are a lot of plants blooming. If you have been watching and I know you have since you are a beekeeper and I don’t know a beekeeper that doesn’t watch to see what is blooming every month of the year. Now some of you are going to say nothing is blooming in Iowa from late November to early March, but I didn’t say watch what is blooming in Iowa. A lot of people travel in the winter and some even go south for the winter like the birds that migrate to the southern hemisphere for the winter. I guess that is why they get called snowbirds. I have traveled south in February and noticed the daffodils blooming along the interstate and side roads and in March you will see the purple trees in full bloom in the woods down south and in early April the dogwood is in bloom in the forest of the south. You can find dandelions blooming anytime of the year in the warmer climates and you don’t have to go much further south than southern Missouri or southern Illinois to find them. Now one of the best surplus honey plants will be in full bloom by the third week of May in a normal year, but a lot of people don’t like the flavor of the honey. This is locust honey. Personally I liked it, as it was one of the very distinct flavors of honey available when I was growing up. Another distinct flavor of honey I grew up enjoying was Pine Honey. Now there are not enough pine trees near my bees in Iowa for me to get Pine Honey. Bob Cox brought a jar of Pine Honey back from his trip to overseas a couple of years ago and when I got a taste it brought back memories of my childhood. Of course my mother didn’t have and extractor, so she would scrape the honey off of the comb and then let it set in a bucket for a day or two and skim the impurities and wax off the honey. She often put a chunk of comb honey in the quart fruit jar and poured the liquid honey over it. This chunk honey always had some cells of pollen in it and when you got a bite of that pollen it was always bitter, but mother said eat it as it is just bee bread. I now know why the pollen had such a bitter taste as there was a weed that grew in the pasture where we didn’t plow the ground that had a lot of blooms about the size of a small aster and it was called bitter weed. In the spring when it first came to life and start to grow and it wasn’t taller than the grass and the cows ate it the milk would turn bitter to drink. The only thing worst than bitter milk was wild onion flavored milk. What does this have to do with beekeeping? Nothing, except to show you those bees will work any flower that is blooming and producing nectar and pollen regardless of where you live or keep bees. In Iowa we have and abundance of excellent honey plants that produce a wonderful product of honey from water white color and extremely mild flavor to a very dark color and stout flavor somewhat like buckwheat honey. Don’t sell your bees short on the kind of honey they produce for you, but capitalize on the rarity of the product and sell specialty honey. If you don’t like the honey your bees produce and won’t eat it your self, why do you think you can convince a customer to buy a special flavored honey. You have to learn to like the flavor or sell the honey to a packer that will pay a premium price for that special honey. I have heard some beekeepers that pack and sell honey; say to a friend I got a lot of ______ honey this year. I don’t like it and the other day I had a customer call me up and ask what was wrong with my honey, and all I could tell her was that the bees gathered ______ honey this year and I can’t control what the bees gather honey from. (You can put any flavor you want into the blanks.) A better explanation would have been to brag to the customer about the rare flavor of honey that your bees had gathered. Give the customer a little information about the fact that the bees gather the sweetest nectar they can find to make honey from and all plants give honey a flavor. Tell the customer that large packers have the ability to blend their honeys so that the product is always near the same flavor. Explain that this method of blending may help the company to keep the customers happy, but it doesn’t allow the customer the opportunity to discover other flavors of honey and maybe find one that really allows them to enjoy and appreciate the efforts of the honeybee. With just a little education to your customers about the different flavors of honey your bees can produce just might move you from a honey packer to a honey packer of specialty honeys that increases your cash flow into your bank account.

I have noticed that the hawthorn trees are in full bloom. Now there is a tree that will make you wish you had not decided to smell the nice blossom, but the little honey bee still makes sweet honey from the nectar. Wild mustard is in full bloom and some fields are yellow with dandelions. The wild plums and other fruit trees are in full bloom and man did the blooms open fast with those 70 and 80 degree days last weekend. Now if the frost didn’t damage the fruit set we should get plenty of nice apples, plums, pears and other fruits this year. Only one other year in the past thirty years have I moved bees into the orchard for pollination as early as we did this year. Normally you don’t have apple trees blooming until the very last of April to the 10th of May. Just in case you are wondering, I am writing this the middle of April to the first of the last week. May all of your plants and fruit trees have survived the late frost in April.

Rambling by The Old Man