Posts Tagged: queen
California Honey Festival: It Was All the Buzz
It was all the buzz. Thousands of bee and honey enthusiasts made a beeline for the California Honey Festival, held last Saturday on the Yolo County Fairgrounds. The annual festival, relocated this year from the streets of downtown Woodland to the fairgrounds due to a weather...
Beekeepers Rick Moehrke and Casey Scott of the Sacramento Area Beekeepers' Association answer questions from attendees at the California Honey Festival. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Charles McMaster, a U.S. Army veteran from Copperas Cove, Texas, explained what the Hives for Heroes is all about. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Steve Hays, retired sheriff's deputy, Sacramento County and founder of Second Chance Beekeeping Reentry Service, talked about his program and how inmates are learning beekeeping and getting "a second chance." (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Alexis Herbert and Missy Rianda of the Honeybee Discovery Center, Orland, offering bee products. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Amina Harris, retired founding director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center and now the "queen bee" of her family's Woodland-based Z Food Specialty and The HIVE, offers attendees a taste of honey. She and the City of Woodland co-founded the California Honey Festival in 2017. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
"Queen Bee" Inna Eyrih of Hawaiian Honey AT&S offers honey samples to attendees. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
This man waiting in line at a California Honey Festival booth wears a sweatshirt expressing a message of compassion, unity and love. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
It's Bee-ginning to Look a Lot Like...
It's bee-ginning to look a lot like Christmas... All hail our littlest agricultural worker. European colonists brought the honey bee (Apis mellifera) to what is now the United States in 1622. Specifically, the bees arrived at the Jamestown colony (Virginia). Native Americans nicknamed...
A feral honey bee colony (now gone) from a backyard in Vacavile, Calif. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Inside a managed hive at UC Davis. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A bee-utiful Christmas wreath, designed and crafted by Ellen Keatley Rose of Castle Rock, Wash. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
No Labor Day Holiday for Honey Bees
On Labor Day, a federal holiday, we celebrate the our country's labor movement, our gratitude, and our achievements. But there is no Labor Day holiday for the worker bee, one of three castes (queen, worker and drone) in a honey bee colony. No Labor Day holiday for the queen, either. In...
Worker bees are aptly named. They comprise most of the bees in the colony and do most of the work. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
This aging worker bee is all tattered and torn. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Foraging can be dangerous. Here a praying mantis has just nabbed a worker bee. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A crab spider feeding on a honey bee. Crab spiders are ambush predators. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Learn About Honey Bees at the California Honey Festival
If you haven't been around honey bees much, and can't distinguish the queen from a worker bee (sterile female) or drone (male bee), head over the California Master Beekeeper Program displays at the California Honey Festival on Saturday between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. in downtown...
The worker bee (sterile female) is at left, and the drone (male) is at right. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Can you find the queen, the workers and the drones? (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Worker bees are sterile females. Here a worker bee (forager) leaves a Mexican sunflower, Tithonia rotundifola. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A Royal Moment with a Queen Bumble Bee
It's Thanksgiving Day and time to give thanks for NOT what we WANT, but what we HAVE. And, not for what we OWN, but what we CANNOT. That includes the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii. On the morning of Nov. 12, we traveled to the Sonoma Cornerstone, Sonoma, to check the plants and...
A queen bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, nectaring on Salvia indigo spires in Kate Frey's pollinator garden on Nov. 12, 2017 at the Sonoma Cornerstone. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
The queen Bombus vosnesenskii begins her bumble bee acrobatics in the Kate Frey pollinator garden, Sonoma Cornerstone. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Ah, nectar. The queen bumble bee extends her tongue (proboscis). (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)