Mailing list for the Person County Beekeepers Association, Roxboro, NC

[donnasteen AT yahoo.com]

In a visit with my neighbor yesterday, I told him of our Sat. honey extracting day.  He then told me of honey extracting when he was a little boy.  He said there were lots of bees in the woods--but not longer.  He said they would gather honey every two or three years.  They would watch for bees drinking water in the mud by a creek.  They would sprinkle a little flour on a bee, then watch which way it flew--because they always fly straight back to their hive--called the "beeline." They would time how long it took for the bee with flour to go and come back, and calculate how far their hive was from that.  (He couldn't remember the calculation.) Then follow the bee line the calculated distance to the tree and harvest the honey.  He remembered about 5 gallons from one tree that had fallen down. Maybe you all knew this, but since I'm a "new-bee.." it was new and interesting to me.