Bee Poo

Healthy bees don't poo inside their hives which is just as well; imagine the mess 60,000 bees would make! Instead they fly off and rest somewhere to perform the business. The problem is that in winter they might not be able to leave the hive for weeks at a time. So they hold on, ... and on, ... and on.

My bees are lucky because in the this part of England cold snaps rarely last more than two weeks, but imagine what it must be like for the bees I saw in the Alps last week which have been cooped up for 3 months already with no hope of relief for at least another 6 weeks.

Fortunately bees don't make much poo because they dine mostly on honey. However, pollen grains floating around in the honey also get eaten, and those indigestible residues in the pollen need to be excreted. So as the days turn into weeks the bees rectum becomes more and more distended so that by the end of an alpine winter almost half the inside of a bee's body is filled by its rectum.

It has been cold here for the last week, but today was markedly warmer. You won't be surprised to learn that hundreds of bees were out and about. Many were foraging on the mahonia and winter-flowering heather, but others had something else in mind judging by the speed they left the hive!