It's mid-April in Western PA and the happiest time of the year has just commenced: dandelion season! Bees love dandelions because they provide copious amounts of nectar during a time when forage is scarce. Dandelion nectar fees the bees and dandelion pollen feeds the baby bees. Our bees are luckier than most: we have ample pollen sources including maple and oak, as well as a large variety of fruit trees that bloom successively and thus provide a steady source of nectar. Many bees do not have that advantage, and for those bees, the humble dandelion is the difference between life and death of the hive. Many of the ornamental fruit trees and hybridized flowers now planted do not in fact supply any nectar or pollen. Daffodils, for instance, are not good sources of nectar or pollen and we've never seen a bee visiting any of the hundreds of daffodils around our yard. We've also never seen bees visiting tulips (if they survive the deer). The Callery pear trees so common now have some pollen, but no nectar. Spraying herbicides and pesticides on dandelions while in bloom is thus incredibly harmful to honeybees, who are either killed outright or slowly poisoned when they bring back these contaminants to the hive where they build up in the wax, poisoning the entire hive. We've seen hive die-offs that we suspect are due to pesticides, and spraying for lawn weeds like dandelions and clover is a big culprit (though luckily, those hives were not ours). In fact, many bees are killed when people unwitting spray for aphids or to fend off other destructive insect pests, oblivious to the fact that they will also kill bees who are foraging. It's not enough to avoid spraying the flowers; bees land on leaves all the time, and if you think of a hive having 40,000 foraging bees, with each bee having 6 legs - that's a lot of dirty little feet that can bring back pesticides to the hive! We don't spray. There just isn't any safe way to do it and not potentially harm our bees. We have fish in our pond too, and herbicides/pesticides have the nasty propensity to find their way into ponds and waterways.
We try to plant a variety of nectar and pollen rich plants around our yard to keep our bees safe at home. We can often recognize our own bees in the yard, and notice stranger honeybees side by side, working the same flowers, so that tells us that the pickings are slim outside of Philosopher Lane. It is not our place to chide our neighbors into no-spray practices; that is not the American way. However, if you want to help honeybees, you should reconsider the dandelion dotting lawns everywhere in April and May. The dandelion is a pretty yet tough plant that can thrive anywhere and perhaps we should admire this hardy little plant and its ability to thrive in the worst conditions. Ours have adapted to have short flower stems so we can cut the lawn and not snip off the flower heads! Dandelion honey has a delicate light floral flavor, and works very well as a substitute for sugar in many recipes where a honey flavor is not desired. On that note - why not leave stands of "weeds" that flower naturally? The bees' favorite nectar sources are those "weeds". We have planted and removed many flowers that the bees ignored. How humbling is it to see your bees ignoring your stand of fancy double petal coneflowers (all sterile without nectar, we discover too late) and hitting up the lawn weeds? When the clover is in bloom, the entire yard smells amazing! We also walk through the lawn looking down, to be sure we don't step on anyone!
Disclaimers: Blog posts are opinions, not advice. One thing all beekeepers will agree on, is that if you ask 10 beekeepers what to do, you'll get 13 different answers. Beekeeping is alchemy, nature, and a bit of magic. Copyright 2020 Philosopher Lane Honey. All Rights Reserved.
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