“Burdock, an essential plant” by Annie Watson, Thistle Hill Studio

The crickets are singing nonstop…We’ll be heading to Addison County Field Days, Vermont’s big agricultural fair, this week…Blackberries are ripe. Most days are still very warm, but there’s a chill in the air of an evening. Summer is winding down.

For honey bees, the next six weeks are crucial, for they must make enough honey to see the colony through next winter. That’s why burdock, now flowering, is so important. In Vermont in August, it’s the bees’ major food source.

If you allow a hedgerow of burdock and other “weeds” such as jewelweed and mustard to grow along borders of your property, you are providing food not only for honey bees but for all manner of pollinators. If the burdock is growing where you don’t want it to (like at the edge of my vegetable garden!), you can watch it and cut it down just after the flowers have begun to dry up but before the seeds have fully formed. That way you can still guard against those pesky burs while allowing the bees a food critical to their survival. It’s really important that we maintain burdock in Vermont! For more about burdock, which is also a very medicinal plant, click here.

“The Making of a Queen” by Annie Watson, Thistle Hill Studio

In this picture you see a “queen cup” — an elongated cell, looking a bit like an ice cream cone, that contains a queen bee larva. The bees are making a new queen, which they do when the queen dies, is failing, or has left the hive with a swarm. A fertilized egg develops into a queen when the workers feed a fertilized egg with a rich food made of honey, pollen, and enzymes, called Royal Jelly. Because she will be a very large bee, she needs a larger cell to grow in.

The queen bee is born with all of the eggs she’ll ever lay in her extra-long abdomen. Once she has mated she deposits one tiny white egg in each cell of honey comb at the rate of up to 2,000 eggs a day at the peak of the spring buildup. But this egg laying is tied to the sun, seasons, and length of the day. The summer solstice having passed on June 21, the queen has begun to slow down in preparation for winter.

The slightly convex cells at the top of the picture are capped honey cells, while the reddish brown, slightly puffy cells further down contain larvae. The uncapped yellow cells contain pollen. Note the “courtier” bees who are tending the queen cell.