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The two-kilometre circle

All chapters
  1. The two-kilometre circle
  2. Why six kilometres costs more than it brings
  3. Three and a half kilos of nectar
  4. What a flow actually is
  5. Maple, willow and the first dandelions
  6. Fruit blossom and hawthorn
  7. The main flow: black locust and clover
  8. Linden in July
  9. The gap in the middle of the year
  10. Goldenrod and the winter stores flow
  11. Ivy, the last flow
  12. Oilseed rape, the flow that sets in the comb
  13. What makes a jar monofloral
  14. Putting a super on at the start of a flow
  15. Pulling it at the end
  16. Reading a capping percentage
  17. Eighteen point six percent
  18. Honey that ferments
  19. Crystallisation is physics, not spoilage
  20. Creaming by the Dyce method
  21. A year of varieties and what each is worth

A colony does not pick a field. It picks a circle, and the apiary sits in the middle of it. Most foraging happens within one to two miles of the entrance, which is about 1.6 to 3.2 kilometres, and bees with decent forage close to home rarely trouble to go further.

A circle of two kilometres' radius covers roughly 1,260 hectares, and everything a hive eats and everything it stores comes out of that ground:

  • the hedge at the end of the lane
  • the orchard two fields over
  • the limes along the village street

Widen it to a mile of radius and you have about 813 hectares; to two miles and about 3,240.

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