I'm looking for a place to keep my bees! It benefits gardens and flowering trees within a four mile radius, and it also offers a tasty supply of delicious local honey made in your backyard! More than a quarter of the bee colonies in the United States were wiped out from colony collapse disorder, putting about one-third of the food we eat at risk of remaining unpollinated.Link, via, via.
Sounds interesting... but my buckeye is poisonous to honeybees. I think they might die.
Wow, I never knew buckeye is poisonous to honeybees!
ReplyDeleteWeird, but true! And terribly unfortunate.
ReplyDelete"Apian considerations: Honeybees are the chief pollinators of California
buckeye, but the pollen and nectar are toxic to them [5,9,14]. Losses
of adult honeybees and their larvae due to poisoning can be severe [9].
Human beings have been poisoned by eating honey made from California
buckeye."
http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/aescal/all.html
Gotta love the Craigs list ads. Too bad you won't be able to keep some. I guess I never would've thought much would be poisonous to bees.
ReplyDeleteUh oh....I planted a red buckeye and a bottlebrush buckeye last year. I sure hope they don't poison bees too, or I'll have to get rid of them. :(
ReplyDeleteI got curious about the buckeyes poisoning bees, and when I did a search, I found this:
ReplyDelete"Some honey bees like to consume fermented nectars containing ethanol more than others, and become notorious chronic inebriates around the hives. Bee colonies station guard bees outside the hives, and these reject the strangely-acting intoxicated bees, forcing them to stay out of the hive until they sober up. If a bee is a repeat offender and returns in an inebriated state to the hive too often, the "bee bouncers" will chew the offending bee's legs off."
Link. That's some "drunk flying" laws!