Hi, I’m Lucille Kowalchuk and I am an apiarist or beekeeper. So we are in Beaver Hills sub drainage basin to the North Saskatchewan River basin. I might just decide that these bees just don’t need anything from me yet. They are going through a flow right now and I want to see how much honey is being produced at this time and I also want to make sure there is room for the queen to keep laying her eggs. The fire is to calm the bees before you go in. It basically masks the pheromones of the guard bees.

Let’s see how the honey flow is doing first. So on a warm day like today, water would be important for the bees because they can use the water to cool the hive by evaporative cooling. They would put that over their cells and fan it and that’s how they control the temperature in the hive. And naturally that would also control the humidity as well. So another important reason for water that we don’t often think about is the feeding of all this larvae. Every single one of these covered cells is gonna need water in its first 6 days of life at a larval stage before this capping. They’ll go through like a litre of water in a day. And then the first few days it’s almost like 80% water, by about the sixth day, it drops to about maybe 50%. This is the stored honey and once the temperature cools, it is obviously going to get thicker and crystallize. And that’s when they really need the water. They can’t necessarily utilize that for food, they have to actually dilute it with water as well to be able to use it so water is important for that. Just any kind of digestion, any metabolic processes, just like you and I, is important to them.

It’s not just water that needs to be available, it needs to be clean. Because if that hyperpharyngeal gland is damaged, there is a lot of larvae that aren’t going to get fed. They are what you call an indicator species. They forage on pollen, the nectar, and the water in the area. When they are declining, our food production is going to decline too. We are not gonna have the variety of food that is available to us today if there are no honey bees or pollinators left to pollinate some crops. My name Is Lucille Kowalchuk and Hastings Lake is my Watermark.