Look at those pollen pants!

The wicked ladies and their hefty pollen pants on their wisteria color custom hive. It's amazing they can still fly with all of that pollen!

More pollen pants in the early morning. These ladies live in one of the hives where we test the durability of our outdoor hive paint in real-use conditions.

​As August leaves us behind for another year, the wicked ladies are hard at work making their preparations for the coming late fall and winter months. Here in the northeast, there will be precious little for our bees to eat after the next month or so, until the flowers come again in spring. 

We support our ladies' late summer and early fall foraging as much as we can. We plant pollinator-friendly, late-blooming annuals and perennials, cut back first blooms of early flowering plants for a second bloom, and we certainly leave those stands of goldenrod and lawn weeds to flower in the sun. Even our later blooming plants are sown in succession, so we hope to have pollen-bearing flowers available right up until frost, generally in mid-October in our area. From dawn to dusk each day, we can find our wicked ladies (as well as many other kinds of bees, wasps, hummingbirds, and butterflies) hard at work in each and every flower patch they can find.

So for the next few weeks, while the weather is still warm and there are still blooms to be found, the ladies are enjoying the dog days of summer by bringing in as much pollen and nectar as they can carry. The shots above are from early morning in two of our hives, and the pictures below are from one of our "flower feeding stations".

​We hope you are enjoying the last of the warm weather as much as our wicked ladies are!