Honey Flow is "on"

Kurt and I were checking my backyard bee hive this Sunday morning and when we opened the hive we discovered that there was a honey flow going on.  In beekeeping vernacular, the honey flow is going on  means that the bees have an abundance of nectar producing flowers within their foraging range which is approximately two miles. When the honey flow is on, the bees are storing the honey in the honeycomb so fast and furious that the honey remains in unsealed honeycomb cells because the honey has not had time to ripen and be capped over. This is fall and kinda rare to have a honey flow of this magnitude this time of year. Looks like we will be extracting honey again this year.

 

 

I decided to try to locate the flower source.  It didn't take long to locate the source...Blooming thickets of whitebrush about 1.5 to 2 miles from the house.  Honeybees were all over the blossoms. 

 

 

 

 

When I got home, I pulled out my Dad's old 1976 copy of "American Honey Plants", and found this interesting quote from  a Texas Beekeeper , B.H. Parks concerning whitebrush.  "Whitebrush blooms several times a year following rains. It yields little honey during  the spring, but during rain induced bloom of late summer and fall, it yields heavily."  Looking back to the prior week, we had had 3.5 inches of rain on Saturday(8 days ago).