I'm curious now if the commercial
> variety is a good honey plant. You can buy a form of smartweed called
> "kiss me over the garden gate".
I never heard of the commercial variety. Smartweed (heartsease) is related
to Buckwheat and produces a dark honey but not as dark as usually mixed with
clover. The flavor in my opinion is flavorful but the smell is not pleasing.
One whiff and most packers will reject the whole drum.
I doubt mixing one drum of pure smartweed to 5 light honey would completely
lose the smell.
That said the honey is slow to crystallize and the bees winter well on
smartweed. On a location on the Blackwater River over looking the bottoms
you see the bees rise from the hives (usually 60 in a location) and head
directly for the bottoms. Back & forth most times of the day. The smartweed
is the pink variety which looks like
a wheat plant and is less than a couple feet tall. When you walk into the
bottoms you see half a dozen bees on each plant .
I had planned to move hives north after the flooding ended as smartweed was
coming up but the drought quickly stopped the smartweed. Water needs to
recede but stay moist for the plant. Instead when things dried up the mud
pinched the tender shoots off.
Those on the list with hives which sit on a permanent locations will see
activity increase at the time of the major flow but when you see bees
working honey plants for as far as the eye can see you see the real
potential
of bees.
*Born to hoard*
I doubt the beekeeper mystery of why certain hives totally out produced
other hives will ever be solved when all hives come from the same stock and
were similar at the start of the flow.
Shannon Wooten and I have discussed the mystery. Shannon looks for these
queens for breeders.
One year one of his queens I received went from a split to produce over 400
pounds of honey in a season. I even brought Glenn Davis (Bell Hill Honey)
out to show the hive with the supers on . We kept the supers separate and
weighed before and after extract. The other 23 Wooten queen headed hives had
decent production but not like the one hive. I tried to slow down the hive
by placing deeps with foundation but the hive drew out and filled.
Has others saw similar at times?
bob
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