We’re heading to the bottom of the year now. In the last few months, the bees have worked hard to make enough honey to get through the winter and build up enough numbers to reproduce and survive. For now, the queen has stopped laying. Beekeepers have installed mouse guards, added insulation, and wrapped their hives with protective and heat-absorbing black tarpaper. Now comes the time to hope and trust that colonies will survive until the first pussy willows and maple flowers come out in early spring.

Visit Live from the Hive around December 21 when we will have a special Christmas/Solstice edition of Live From the Hive!

Annie Watson

The staghorn sumac (Rhus typhinia or Rhus hirta) flowers that the honeybees pollinated in June have developed into dark, velvety fruit clusters, or drupes. You can gather the drupes to make into a Vitamin C- and flavor-rich drink, or to dry and use next summer for your smoker fuel if you keep bees. Make sure you’re not collecting poison sumac fruits. Identification info at this Ohio State University web site, and a recipe at Healing-from-home-remedies.

You can also leave the fruits for the deer and birds to enjoy all winter, and for visual beauty in the landscape, their burgundy red standing out against the white of winter snows.

At the hive, the bees are still flying, gathering the last bits of pollen and nectar from late-blooming garden flowers and the last few asters, dandelions, or goldenrod.

Annie Watson

The honey bees are going all out, searching the goldenrod plants for every last flower that offers another grain of pollen, another drop of nectar, carrying their precious loads of gold back to the hive. The honey they are making now will help them through the long winter. Purple asters are flowering, and these too give nectar for spicy aster honey.

As I watch the bees, am I preparing too? Am I taking into my being the warmth of the sun, the blue jay’s sharp cry, the blades of green, the late-blooming dandelion? Am I storing up these things like the bees store honey, to be brought out like precious jewels during the cold days ahead?

Annie Watson