Ravenous Bees

Phil grazed the sheep around the beehives. They did a good job clearing the underbrush. (Look in the background down the row: the brown section immediately behind them was grazed about a week ago and hasn’t started growing back. Right beyond that, though, is the section grazed three weeks ago, and it is growing back quite well.)

I wonder if the electric netting affected the bees adversely. They seemed to be constantly starving. As in, the two hives ate over ten pounds of sugar (mixed with 20 cups of water) from 11am to 8pm today. Maybe they couldn’t leave the netting, and needed to rely on me alone for their food?

At first I expected it was just because we got about 3.5” of rain last week. Maybe all that rain washed away the pollen, and the bees were hungry. And I’ve heard that, in areas with bears (like our area), it’s a good idea to have electric netting up to keep the bears away.

I would turn the fence off, too, to access the bees, to feed them more sugar water. And they didn’t change their frenetic feeding at all.

But, as much as this thought tickled the back of my mind, it appeared to be confirmed this evening. I went to make up the next five pounds of sugar water solution, and in the five minutes I was away, Phil moved the energizer. When I let, hundreds of buzzing bees circled the feeders. When I came back, the more normal dozen or so remained, drinking their fill.

Coincidence? Perhaps. It was dusk; maybe the bees were simply all getting their evening snack before settling in for the night.

Somehow I doubt it, though. We’ll have to watch that energizer placement more carefully in the future.

Phil continues to move the cows to a new paddock every day. They don’t entirely strip the ground, but they do a good job clearing most of the organic matter, disturbing the earth with their hooves, adding their fertilizer. (Yes: in the photo below, the brown looked like the green only the day before. They really do a good job cleaning up.)

He moves the sheep, too, once or twice a day. He spends a lot of his time setting up and taking down fence.

I made my first loaf of sourdough bread in over a year today. Sourdough requires about a week of initial fermentation, where rye flour and water sit, loosely covered, so yeast spores from the air land and start to ferment. My version was dense, though flavorful. And how wonderful, to make bread with an ingredient list of spelt, rye, water, and salt.