Aloes In Bloom!

craigcryptoking (69)in #gardening • 4 years ago

Hey everyone, if you have not yet gathered, I am a total nature nut, anything and everything NATURE I truly adore and anything that helps or feeds my bees I ADORE MORE....

Would you believe these Aloes are in our garden, my landlord has a Nursery and these are for sale, I just had to pop down to the bottom of the plot and picture these. Alose normally only flower in mid-end Winter and these are and well, which the bees love. Another amazing thing about aloes is they are one of the few flowers that render both pollen and nectar for bees, BRILLIANT!

Aloe ( /ælˈoʊi/, /ˈæloʊi, ˈæloʊ/), also written Aloë, is a genus containing over 500 species of flowering succulent plants.[3] The most widely known species is Aloe vera, or "true aloe", so called because it is cultivated as the standard source of so-called "aloe vera" for assorted pharmaceutical purposes.[4] Other species, such as Aloe ferox, are also cultivated or harvested from the wild for similar applications.[citation needed]
The APG IV system (2016) places the genus in the family Asphodelaceae, subfamily Asphodeloideae. Within the subfamily it may be placed in the tribe Aloeae.[5] In the past, it has been assigned to the family Aloaceae (now included in the Asphodeloidae) or to a broadly circumscribed family Liliaceae (the lily family). The plant Agave americana, which is sometimes called "American aloe", belongs to the Asparagaceae, a different family.
The genus is native to tropical and southern Africa, Madagascar, Jordan, the Arabian Peninsula, and various islands in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius, Réunion, Comoros, etc.). A few species have also become naturalized in other regions (Mediterranean, India, Australia, North and South America, Hawaiian Islands, etc.) Check out more here as per wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloe

The East African lowland honey bee (Apis mellifera scutellata) is a subspecies of the western honey bee. It is native to central, southern and eastern Africa, though at the southern extreme it is replaced by the Cape honey bee (Apis mellifera capensis).[1] This subspecies has been determined to constitute one part of the ancestry of the Africanized bees (also known as "killer bees") spreading through America.[2]
The introduction of the Cape honey bee into northern South Africa poses a threat to East African lowland honey bees. If a female worker from a Cape honey bee colony enters an East African lowland honey bee nest, she is not attacked, partly due to her resemblance to the East African lowland honey bee queen. As she is capable of parthenogenetic reproduction, she may begin laying eggs which hatch as "clones" of herself, which will also lay eggs, causing the parasitic A. m. capensis workers to increase in number. The death of the host colony results from the dwindling numbers of A. m. scutellata workers that perform foraging duties (A. m. capensis workers are greatly under-represented in the foraging force), the death of the queen, and, before queen death, competition for egg laying between A. m. capensis workers and the queen. When the colony dies, the capensis females will seek out a new host colony.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bee

Talking of bees.....