Hive checks are always fascinating

Hive checks and maintenance are the bread and butter of beekeeping. Every frame tells a story of the life of the hive. Is the queen laying well, is the hive getting overcrowded but always fascinating is where the bee’s are collecting from. You can see in this picture from earlier in the season the diversity of pollen collected.

“Where does the purple come from”

One of the interesting advances we can now use is image analysis via Google or ChatGPT it usually has something worth saying about a frame of honey and the bees. Here it suggest the purple came from a popular ground cover crop used by farmers, Phacelia. These days in large gardens people are using this pretty purple flowering plant again as ground cover to out compete weeds. In the end only the Bee’s really know where it came from.