Tag: Bees

City Bees, Country Bees

by Sue Smith-Heavenrich For the past 12 years I’ve kept track of the pollinators visiting my rural garden, counting the number of bees, wasps, flies and others that visit flowers. Each spring, things are quiet and I worry the bees won’t show up. But by July I see the glint of metallic sweat bees and

Read More »

Building a Community of Honeybee Enablers One Hive at a Time

By Holli Cederholm On Thalassa Raasch’s outstretched palm is a rainbow of pollen – yellow, orange, gray, green and even bright blue – reflecting the colors of the early spring blooms that honeybees have collected the grains from. It is a sunny, 60-degree day in April and Raasch, clad in coveralls and a floral-print neckerchief

Read More »

Smaller and Lighter Beehives Are Better

Photo 1 – A complete, two-queen, side-by-side hive. Each side is a stack of three four-frame medium boxes. Entrances to the hives are on opposite ends, minimizing drift of bees from one box to its neighbor. Photo 2 – Hive components specific to a two-queen, side-by-side, four-frame hive shown from front to back: an inner

Read More »

Native Pollination

Two native sweat bees. Photo by Daniel B. VanWart Carpenter bee. Photo by Daniel B. VanWart Eastern bumblebee. Photo by Daniel B. VanWart Half black bumblebee. Photo by Daniel B. VanWart By Gail J. VanWart Photos © Daniel B. VanWart, used with permission My husband, Daniel, and I steward an organic wild blueberry farm in

Read More »

Plant Corridors

Clethra alnifolia Liatris and a Monarch butterfly Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum) By Heather McCargo Photos by Jean English Native plant corridors attract pollinators and wildlife to your farm by stretching across your property to connect your piece of native habitat to nearby meadows, wetlands or woodlands. This creates a much larger area for native pollinators

Read More »

Blue Orchard Bee

Blue orchard bee. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_orchard_bee By Adam Tomash Photos by the author The honeybee is the pollinator we most depend on, but other pollinators exist, and 4,000 species of feral (native) bees live in North America. Roughly one-third of these bees nest in small cavities or tunnels, such as hollow plant stems, borer tunnels and

Read More »

Honeybees

2009 Farmer-to-Farmer Conference Christy Hemenway of Gold Star Honeybees in Bath, Maine, with her top bar hive made of Maine pine, and a bar on which bees have built their own foundation of natural beeswax. Hemenway was one of three beekeepers who talked about different methods of keeping bees naturally at the Farmer to Farmer

Read More »

Bee Friendly Farming

Pollinator Profiles More than 270 species of bees are native to Maine. Here are a few that you might see in your meadows and crops this summer: Bumblebees (family Apidae) – Sixteen species of bumblebees live in Maine, ranging in size from under 1/2 inch to about an inch long. They are hairy, and usually

Read More »

Bees

By John Koster Many people don’t know that they’ve ever seen Allendale, New Jersey, but the borough turns up all the time as a backdrop to movies and television shows because Allendale embodies an eastern suburb that’s tastefully affluent without being unduly ostentatious. “Morning Glory,” a Paramount Pictures feature film starring Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton,

Read More »
Categories
Scroll to Top