Organic HONEY BEES
...from the beginning.
Just as we are advised to eat a "wide variety" of foods, long-standing wisdom is to keep honey bees in "highly diverse" forage. Many attribute the decline of honey bees directly to the decline of diverse forage. Therefore, to save our honey bees, plant forage. But what, exactly?
Main Menu
Honey bees get energy from the carbohydrates in nectars, and proteins and fats from pollens. Pollen and nectar, THAT is their diet; this we know, with only a few details. What we do not know is which plants in a patch of diverse forage are providing the required balance - the correct ratios of nutrients - in their diet.
We therefore do not truly KNOW what to plant for forage.
Here we will start with a few good guesses for quantity, and then do the science for quality.
Follow the Recipe - Just This Once
Wide variety - high diversity - balanced diet - quality forage - what does it mean? What does it matter?
Quality forage is like a gold mine where high grade ore yields more gold per ton than low grade. Same with pollens: High grade pollen yields more total protein, 25% being a nice number in forage, while 15% barely pays the energy costs of extracting it and may end in bankruptcy.
Total protein from pollen is just the start, however. The usefulness of that protein in a healthy diet also depends on its amino acid profile - proteins are MADE from dozens of amino acids - and the very highest grade pollen would have amino acids in the exacting RATIOS honey bees are known to require.
It's like making cookies - where RATIOS of ingredients are important. If you have only one cup of flour, for example, it matters not that you have two cups of raisins and lots of vanilla because you can't use them to make more cookies, not without essential flour. Think of missing ingredients as NOT a balanced diet.
The correct ratios of amino acids are central to balanced nutrition. We - and honey bees - eat proteins, and our bodies break them down into their constituent amino acids, which become general purpose building blocks. We then reassemble those amino acid building blocks into the proteins that WE need by following templates (cookie recipes) encoded in our DNA. If even one building block is missing, certain proteins - a specific muscle or enzyme protein for example - cannot be assembled, and this is one aspect of malnutrition. All animals are this way; it takes that variety and diversity of proteins with different amino acid profiles to meet our needs. Babies of every species are most at risk when balanced meals are not provided.
In some cases our bods (adults more than young) can synthesize an amino acid as needed, but some we cannot make and these are termed essential because we must get them from our food - from our balanced diet and quality forage.
Honey bees require 10 essential amino acids from their forage. But if they find only 9 - if the needed pollens are absent or of low grade - they are in trouble. As they expend energy gathering poor pollens or pollens they can't use because they don't balance, the health of the colony declines; immune systems are compromised and they are vulnerable to disease, or they are too weak to survive winter.
Proteins are the foundation. Carbohydrates, essential fats, vitamins, minerals, trace elements and more are equally crucial to vitality. Then add the effects of microbial life affecting solubility of nutrients at the roots of unkilled organic soil, and medicinal compounds bound up in nectars in the blossoms above; then add things we've not imagined - only Nature can put that cookie together. If we let Her.
Conferring Specificity
This is about farming, but there is late snow on the ground. It's about research, but methods and metrics must be set down, and equipment set up. More, then, as the growing season gets on.