The honey from my own backyard is delicious
as you appear knowledgable about this situation, hopefully you can answer aquestion that’s been bothering me; the lack of honeybees on white clover...when I was a kid, 60 years ago, if I walked barefoot across the lawns, which were always mottled with white clover, I could anticipate getting stung; today, I stroll across a nearby meadow loaded with clover, and see nary a honeybee...I see plenty of bumble bees, but no honeybees...
is it simply a decline in population, or is something else happening...?
I dont know if it was a die off from the new pesticide use or a lull in bee keeping or maybe both and several other factors that triggered the panic of the Colony Collapse Disorder around 2005-07. It might have just been the squeaky wheel syndrome, but it got me interested.
Honey bees have been doing their thing for a very long time. The same way, tirelessly for thousands of years.
The honey industry is big $$ so some big bee farmers feed their bees HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup = CHEAP) to maximize profit. This honey tastes like crap.
Literally, shipping containers FULL of Not-Honey have been seized coming into the U.S. from China.
BAYER (aspirin co.) sells more neonicotinoid pesticides than anything else and are in it for the big $$.
The management of honey bees is very local, independent and sporadic as humans tend to be. If there were managed or feral hives within 2 or 3 miles, as the bee flys, to your childhood clover field, the bees will find it. One or two years of the farmer planting something that doesnt produce enough nectar for the bee survival could drive them away. Or the 6+ years of screaming heat and drought like we had here in Kansas will make it hard for a beekeeper to manage successfully. With this years moisture and plant growth, everyones hives around here are busting at the seams with honey and splitting their hives or capturing swarms and starting new ones. And just having one hive in a an area that has been bee free will produce more nectar producing plants than with out them due to the increased natural pollination of the bees. More bees + more nectar producing plants = more bees and more HONEY.
Starting my hives in my backyard is one of the most ‘real’ things I have done in a while. Its like a huge and serius ant farm ‘cept they make the best sweetener the world has ever known, and they fly and sting the $hit outta you if you are careless! I started with 2 empty wood boxes in the spring and I would estimate there are at least 30,000 or 40,000 bees tending to over 60-80 pounds of honey right now.