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We’ve decided to feed our bees, mainly because we are not at all certain they are getting the food requirements necessary to sustain them. Another reason is that we have seen them become weaker over these past 5 years with more losses and smaller hives with fewer stores of honey.

Critical point has long been reached.

These past few weeks we have watched our little herb garden bee hive become more and more active….to the point of a little aggressive. Of course, being this time of year our minds went to a few different explanations as we kept our distance to allow them to do their thing.

There are several reasons a normally docile bee hive might suddenly become more assertive – one occurs when they are stressed at this time of year such as a lack of winter stores of food (probably sounds like us all, trying to gather winter food and fuel LOL). However, with the summer we just had, a lack of food stores would hardly be the case.

Its good to see the Bees back into the swing of things again, the last few weeks of sunshine was the boost that was needed to get them flying and foraging. Unfortunately, the rain has returned and settled in for the time being. This change in weather will affect the bees ability to build stores up for the winter so lets hope that the sunshine returns very soon.

Having enough to eat during the winter and early spring is an important topic for Bees. Bees store their food source because they do not hibernate during the cold months and must have enough food stores to last until they can get back to foraging when the weather turns.

It is important that there is a variety of honey within the hive, summer honey as well as honey stored from late autumn because honeys from different seasons and plants will store at different hardness. Ivy honey stores, gathered in the Autumn and Winter, is very hard and would be impossible to digest if not mixed with softer honeys.