Honey bees use water to cool the hive, to thin the honey stores for eating during the winter…etc, and they need quite a bit. Having a water source in close proximity to the hive is very important.

Today’s brief post is mainly a thank you to the ladies at the American Paper Company here in Starke, Florida.  Also a good little trick on how to easily provide a water source for your honey bees…if you don’t already have a natural water source.  This store American Paper Company is a party supply company that has, party supplies (obviously),  Special Event Equipment & Supplies, and they are also Fed Ex receiving service.

I guess I should start at the beginning for this post to completely make sense.  I thought I had a creek near my home out here in the country, so I didn’t worry about giving our honey bees a water source here in our yard.  A neighbor of mine told me a few weeks ago that he had a bunch of honey bees visiting his pool, which as you would expect can be annoying. So, I told them that I had a solution and not to worry, by next summer the bees wouldn’t be visiting his pool anymore.  The honey bees can be re-trained to use an alternate water source, by placing water buckets in the apiary. I am also sure that my neighbor will be covering his pool during the cold months and that will aid in re-training the bees to use our water buckets.  Bees will drown in the water ,if you don’t place some sort of float inside the container holding the water. I guess someone didn’t tell the honey that they can’t swim, because I always find several floating dead in the bucket.  This afternoon I was peaking in on the colonies to see how they where fairing, and I noticed that the floats I placed in my buckets….where not floating, go figure.  I have placed buckets of water in my Apiary before and new that the peanut packing pieces float good and provide an ideal place for the honey bees to stand on while they suck up water for their colonies.  What I do is drill a bunch of holes all around the bucket, about 3-4 inches from the top of the bucket.  This is a trick I learned in one of my beekeeping books.  The rain will refill the buckets from time to time, and the water will not get too high and spill out the peanut packing pieces onto the ground….pretty neat trick, right? We had some shopping to do at Wal-mart and I thought we could pick up some of those peanut packing pieces while we were there.  Wal-mart didn’t carry them, but I remembered we had a party supply store here in town that also had a Fed Ex and we thought maybe they might have them for sale.  That’s where the American Paper Company comes in…although they didn’t sell the packing peanuts, (they do sell bubble wrap, along with anything one would need for a party),  they had some on hand.  It turns out that they get some packages in from time to time that do have the packing peanuts in the boxes, and they save it.  I told them my story and what I was using the packing peanuts for and they where kind enough to give me a bag of them for free.  Now, I hope I didn’t get anybody in trouble for telling this, but I was very grateful that they wanted to help out the bees, that I wanted to tell my readers about the Good Will shown to us this holiday season.  To the ladies at the American Paper Company, thank you once again , and be on the lookout for a couple of free bottles of our local raw honey.  I wish I had some honey on hand, but it’s all gone.  In the summer I will have some, and we will remember you ladies.  Have a Very Merry Christmas ladies and see ya’ll in the summer.  For the rest of my readers Happy Beekeeping and if you are ever in the Starke Florida area, be sure to stop by and purchase all of your party supplies at the American Paper Company.

Below is a video of the water buckets I have in the Apiary

Related Articles

• The New York bees that made red honey (telegraph.co.uk)
• The mystery of the Red bees of Red Hook (nytimes.com)

• What is the BEE Colony Collapse Disorder? (greenanswers.com)
• $15 Billion Bee Murder Mystery Deepens (businessinsider.com)
• Feeding Time (telegraph.co. uk)