Fruits

-Posted by Isaac

Good evening bees.

Good morning bees!

There is a lot of shifting this time of year. Day and night, bees going everywhere. 

This week we saw the first of our babies leave their nursery. Pictured above, Laura Urban puts the finishing touches on the first of two big loads. She texted me later in the day. They made it to their new (temporary) home safe and sound.

150 down, 300 to go.

And maybe there will be a few stragglers becoming Honeyrun bees.

There is a story behind this. I just got 100 new queens on Tuesday, opened the box, set it on the AC unit then started in on something else, forgetting all about it. Several hours later we had a small tornado of bees surrounding that box. Taking the box away, the tornado remained. For the next hour. I guess the queen pheromone was that strong. At that point I thought I'd just gather the bees by putting a queenright nuc there. I think it worked!

The nucs become the fruits of our spring.

But others are thinking about the fruits of summer and fall. So this week, by day we worried over the nucs, by night we moved our pollinators into the orchards.

If it's cool enough in the evening, you can use the last of the light to load, but mostly this work is done in the dark.

Yesterday I took the last load to the Lynd Fruit Farm above Pataskala. 

This is always a fun one. We drop the hives on baling wagons, then pull the wagons into the orchard. And after that, it never fails, Lester Lynd fills me with apple knowledge. Honeycrisp, Evercrisp, Autumn Crisp, Pixie Crunch, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Fuji, Jonathan... and about 10 others. The man is a fountain. He can ramble about apples the way a beekeeper rambles about bees. 

We tour through the orchards and watch other people work. 

Then I drive home bleary eyed, and think about all the research, technology, chemistry, physics, hard labor and plain old blind luck that goes into producing a quality fruit.

And I can't wait for summertime!