It’s the rainy season here on the farmstead.
It’s a time where mosquitos flourish, thistles reach up to my shoulders and the birds are becoming fat with bugs to devour.
It’s also a bit of a lull period where there are only a few opportunities for bees to do the work they were destined to do. The apple and cherry trees have long since lost their blossoms. The lilacs and honeysuckle have melted away. Stubby clover and dandelions have sustained the pollinators for now.
Most of the neighbor’s bees are hungry for the basswoods to start to unfurl later this month and next. Then the grand honey-making can begin.
It’s pollinator month. A time to reflect on these wonderful creatures and the work they do to grow the foods we eat and love. And as I hone on on these honey makers, I’ve noticed something bizarre this season. Last year it was the lack of rain. Anytime we watered the garden, bees covered the ground thirsty for water. This year it’s their strange manifestation with manure. Chicken manure that is.
Everywhere my chickens go, they leave behind their manure, which eventually makes it down into the soil and fertilizes anything around it. But while the manure is still fresh, the bees are all over it.
“What’s up with that?” I asked our local beekeeper. He’d never seen it before. Now I had a bee master stumped.
So what would drive a honey bee to chase the honey wagon? I have my own theories that while the bees await the smorgasbord of nectar to begin opening, they are in need of something that this manure offers. I thought maybe it was the high protein diet of the birds that the bees were after. But they don’t seem to go after the dry feed, which is in the same area as the manure. Perhaps they prefer it further processed, or wet.
Regardless, none of us have seen this sort of behavior from the bees before.
I dug further into what might be causing this behavior and found an interesting article on honeybees using livestock manure not to eat, but to protect their hives. It seems the bees have found that by spackling manure around the entrances into their hives it limits hornets from attacking the hives and taking the larvae as food for their own young.
Another article agreed with my original thinking that bees are finding sugar and other nutrients from the manure. The sugar comes from the complex carbon compounds breaking down. You may also find bees digging through your compost piles looking for these compounds. Generally this is just a temporary thing.
“This typically occurs when there are minimal plants in bloom,” wrote Mike McNally on the Bee Culture website.
And just as I was wondering as I explained what was happening to our local beekeeper, someone often asks Mr. McNally what honey tastes like when coming from these manure licking honey bees.
“It tastes like crap,” he said.
As logical as that would seem, there is an abundance of bee forums in which people will argue to the death that you can’t taste or smell the manure in the honey. I can’t help but bee skeptical.
If you’ve got knowledge on the subject, I’d love to hear from you.
