Snow on the Prairie did the heavy lifting for providing our bees with pollen and nectar in August and September. As noted before, it’s a throat irritant so we encourage the bees to stockpile it for winter but don’t harvest the honey for human consumption.
Now that the Snow on the Prairie is fading away, Broomweed is picking up the slack in October. Although the flowers are pretty, the honey from Broomweed has a strong taste. Like the Snow on the Prairie, our Broomweed goal is for our beehives to build up stores for winter feeding instead of harvesting for humans to eat.
Now there are other wildflowers at the ranch the bees can forage, just not as plentiful this year. For example, there are Sunflowers, Wild Blue Sage, and White Aster.
And we’ve begun seasonal seeding to increase the number of flowers available to our bees in the coming years. For instance, this past weekend, we harvested about 10 pounds of sunflower seeds from our existing plants and spread them near the apiary so our bees don’t have to fly far to get to them.