The Buzz on Bees with Bee Butler Michael King ~ May 23rd

Last evening our honeybees arrived at the hotel for their extended stay with us. They are all FPP members, that stands for Fully Proficient Pollinators.

You think that Vancouver Airport has lots of take offs and landings every day ?! We will have way more !!

As of this morning once the rains have stopped there will be thousands of bees taking off with no cargo on their outbound trips but on the inbound journeys each bee will be carrying payloads of approximately their own body weight in the form of nectar and pollen. They will have flown up to 5 kilometers from the hive and will find their way back to their own hive by using the sun as their navigating tool. They will make up to 50 trips a day from sun-up until sun-down and will have visited about 100-150 flowers on each journey in order to fill themselves to capacity. They will deposit their cargo of pollen and nectar in the hive where other worker bees will then use it to feed the bee larva or store the nectar in the honeycomb where the sugars will start to metabolize and turn to honey as the moisture content in the nectar starts to evaporate.

The honeybee season is about to ‘take off” and bee tours will begin on Tuesday May 27th at 3pm and continue each and every day with our resident bee team of Tara Alexander, Zach O’Drowsky, Kim Gomez, Brooke Walker and myself.

Learn more about our bees and #BeeButler at: http://bit.ly/beebutler