We have photos from a new contributor, reader Lesli Sagan. She keeps bees and sends us photos of honeybees.  Lesli’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

All of these photos were taken in Ithaca, NY this past summer and fall, 2024. I’ve been keeping bees for decades and tend to garden for them: asters, oregano, mountain mint, coneflowers, and anything else I think they would like are my garden favorites. There’s some question in my mind whether European honey bees (Apis mellifera) are truly “wild,” given that we’ve selectively bred them. However, they are free to go anytime and often do return to the wild by absconding or swarming.

Unused bee equipment is attractive to all sorts of critters, including honey bees who may either be looking for a new home or are attracted, during lean times, to the scent of honey.

These are bees emerging through an opening in the cover of their hive.

Asters bloom until the first hard frost, and so are valuable sources of nectar and pollen for honey bees and all sorts of other insects.

This closer look of a honey bee shows her body is still fuzzy and her wings are whole. Honey bees live about a month in summer and they can be nearly bald and their wings quite ragged towards the end of the lives. This bee is probably a couple of weeks old.

While this bee is likely going for the nectar, we can still see yellow pollen on her face.

In contrast to the young bee above, this old girl has lost much of her fuzziness and her wings have been literally flown to bits. Mountain mint is a favorite of all sorts of bees.

The top bee on mountain mint is Apis mellifera, and the bee below may be as well. Not all domesticated honey bees are the familiar gold and black; darker varieties exist. None of my hives have the darker variety, so if this is Apis mellifera, she’s not from my hives.

This is an unremarkable scene at a hive entrance. Bees are coming and going, and while a few are likely guards, there are no hornets or other predators trying to break in just now.

Another fuzzy young bee, this time on oregano. She is collecting pollen, as you can see from the white pollen ball on her back leg. Pollen colors don’t always match the color of the flowers, but in this case, the petals and pollen are bright white.

This hive has windows, and here you can see the worker bees preparing cells for the honey flow.

If anyone wants to watch a complete hive inspection from this past summer, here’s a link to a GoPro video.