Bad Day

Yesterday, my family opened the hive. We checked to see if the bees were alive. There were none alive. We had to clean out the hive and we got a lot of honey. We buried the bees on the edge of my ravine behind my house.

I felt very very sad when I saw all of those dead bees. Some of the bees on the top were actually moldy. I think the cold weather and the moisture in March killed them. We saw a lot of eggs from the Queen. We tried to look for her, but we couldn't find her.

We cleared out the hive by taking out all the honeycomb and dead bees. We left some of the honeycomb in big bowls in the yard. The good news is I saw a ton of honeybees today on the honeycomb. I had to watch where I stepped because there were so many--I might have gotten stung if I had stepped on one. The bees will take that honey back to their hives. It will go to good use. They might be wild bees. We're hoping that some bees will move in during swarming season in late May. This is how they swarm: they split up the hive and they move. The queen takes one half and guides them.

We learned a lot by losing those poor bees.

Flowers that stink

I just visited a list of flowers that have a disgusting odor.  http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ww0602.htm#carrion

Flies pollinate these kinds of flowers. Orchids, yellow skunk cabbage and a whole lot of other ones that stink too. It isn't really important to plant these kinds of flowers in our gardens because we do not want to smell that stinky odor. And these flowers do not come from plants that make food for us. These flowers smell like rotting flesh and one even smells like dog poop! Most of the flowers we think of smell nice so I found it a little funny that there are flowers that smell gross. This is how I found out about these kinds of flowers: a bee movie I watched in the theater. It was called The Queen of the Sun.  http://www.queenofthesun.com/

When I heard that flies pollinate I thought, "What the heck?" so I wanted to know more about it.