It is November and we were having a wind free 60 degree bananna belt day
the boil is going I just finished skimming hot break off and I see this thing
that I thought was a spider dangling by my hat bill…so I grabbed my hat
and swatted it down…it was a HONEY BEE!..I am thinking wow this is
so strange…so i picks her up and takes her outside (tactfully avoiding the
stinger that was being deployed in a futile attempt to snag me) I set
her down and she disappears…I go back to the garage and then much
to my amazement I am visited by 5 -6 more honey bees. They were detecting
the sugar fumes and there is NOTHING blooming for them to eat and the warm day
had them active. It was way strange. ???
Had the same thing happen with the smoker yesterday. I had some chicken out there that was marinated in a BBQ sauce I made with beer (naturally) and the aroma drug in bees and wasps. Whoever said bees are turned off by smoke didn’t tell that to the bees that sat on top of the smoker. At least the bees weren’t aggressive. Can’t say the same for the wasps. What a bunch of jerks.
I brewed a Honey Bee Brown ale that made it to the finals last year in the Bluebonnet comp in Texas. I probably scooped 20 bees out of the kettle during the boil, and they were beginning to make me nervous. We’ve had a few fatalities out here from Africanized bees and I really didn’t want to have that fight in my garage.
I brewed on Sunday and fought little hornet-like bees all day. They were too big for a sweat bee, but smaller than the normal “mean” bees we get here in Nebraska. I had a little Crown Royal sitting out that had raisins soaking it in. Those bees came in with the smell of the mash, but when I brought out the Crown they were diving into what little of it I had. I was picking out drunk bees all day. Didn’t bother me, just wanted that raisinized whiskey mix.
I guess the good news is that this week’s little cold snap took care of whatever the hell those were. My brewing “guests” tend to be larger but I don’t think they’d pass up Crown either