Happy National Honey Bee Awareness month!
At the Golden Stage Inn, we love love LOVE our bees. Here are some great bee facts and trivia to celebrate National Honey Month. We hope some of these stories and tidbits inspire you to take a peek at honey bee activism, beekeeping, or the hives at Golden Stage Inn.
- For guests who want to tour a honey bee hive, warm weather is just around the corner. Join us on a sunny day to take a look at honey bees busy in their hive collecting nectar and raising brood. Golden Stage Inn will provide protective beekeeper’s clothing and all the information you could ask for. Learn all about honey bees’ social lives, ecology, environmental threats, and taste the sweet rewards of honey galore.
- Did you know that honey bees dance? It’s true! While the dances are awfully cute and a joy to watch, they are not all fun and games. Honey bee dancing is an intelligent form of communication. Scout bees go out to find great forage, which means places with lots of flowers and nectar. They come back and tell the rest of the hive about the special spot they found. The dance tells every other bee how far away the flowers are, which direction to go, and how good of a forage spot it is. Check it out!
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nga4Z_HRUsU[/youtube]
- Though the VT Golden Honey Festival is several months away (the date is set for September 13th!), you can get a glimpse of the festivals joys by examining our backyard beehives and tasting pure raw honey.
- This May, Innkeeper Julie is installing new bees into the hives. Sadly, the old hives did not make it through the rough winter, perhaps due to lack of forage in the summer or extreme cold in the winter. The date is not exact, but if you’re around the area in early May, check in to see when our bed & breakfast’s new bees will arrive!
- The Honey Month in May helps raise awareness about the importance of honey bees to agriculture and the ecosystem. Did you know that 100% of almond trees are pollinated by honey bees?! If this species were to go extinct, there would be no more almonds…ever! Other important crops dependent on honey bees include:
- apples
- coffee
- avocados
- limes
- watermelons
- sunflowers
- clover and alfalfa (essential for dairy & farm animals!)
- cucumbers
- all sorts of berries
- lemons
- beans…
- the list goes on! Read about all of the crops that honey bees help pollinate here.
- $14.6 billion sounds like a lot, huh? If you put a price on the honey bees species value, that was the going rate in the year 2000! Due to inflation, increased demand, and an increasing human population, it’s likely that honey bees are even more valuable today.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO13k2TnNhc[/youtube]
You can help the honey bees too!
Start a backyard beehive, or if it’s too much work or you are allergic to bees, support your local beekeepers in their work. Learn more about colony collapse disorder and help educate others. Visit the Golden Stage Inn to get a live honey bee hive tour, or stop by during VT Golden Honey Festival on September 13th, 2014 for educational workshops and honeybee-related vendors.
Honey Bees work hard to create honey out of nectar from flowers. Did you know one honey bee will create only 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime? …it takes a hive! [Image courtesy the Grafton Nature Museum]