By Tuesday, the honeybees had just about mined all the easy fungal spores out of the sawdust pile.  Or so I assume since only a handful of bees were visiting the patch at any given time.

Until, that is, Mark cut our firewood to length and was suddenly bombarded with honeybees.  One or more of those logs must have been far more full of fungi than the previous logs were because the bees gathered so many spores I could see objects in the bees' pollen baskets.  (The spores are the brown clump halfway down the hind leg of the bee in this photo.)

I still have no proof that these are actually fungal spores being gathered so avidly by our honeybees, but it sure doesn't look like sawdust in that pollen basket.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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