The Bee Feeder

A month ago, Mom ordered some bees so we could put them in a beehive in the orchard. We put the box in the orchard so the bees could pollinate the fruit trees and give us honey! Bees use their sense of smell, to find the flowers they’re looking for. They arrived in the post office a couple of weeks late, and a lot of them had died. It was sad to see lots of the bees dead.

Dad, Isaac, Samuel, and I, took the bees down to the bee box and poured the bees in the box, then we put the queen in. We put her in the middle frame of the box. There were a lot more bees alive than we thought there were. They flew everywhere. 

After dumping the bees in and letting the queen out of her cage, we put the lid on the box. The queen can lay up to 2000 to 3000 eggs a day! That’s a lot. Then we went up to the house to make some sugar water for them.

This is how we made it for the bees. We took a pot and put some sugar in it, them we put a couple of cups of water in it and turned the stove on to boil the water. While the water was boiling, I made a bee feeder to put the sugar water in.

To make the bee feeder, I washed out an old coconut oil container then I got the drill and drilled about twelve holes just below the lid. The holes I drilled were to let a little food out at a time for the bees. Then it was done. After the sugar water was done and cooled, we put it into the feeder and took it down to the bees.

A couple of hours later, the bees were all over the feeder and everywhere around! Did you know a bee’s wing beats 11,400 times per minute? That’s why they make a buzzing noise. It was very cool to watch them. The next day, I went down to check the feeder and the sugar water was gone! I refilled it and the bees were happy again.

Bees are fun to watch. They are fun to watch on flowers, and it is amazing how they turn nectar into honey. I am glad we put the bees in the orchard. They will help our fruit trees give more fruit and help the garden grow.

~Jonah