The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 1 of 21
A quarter hectare in a circle of 1,260
All chapters
- A quarter hectare in a circle of 1,260
- Reading a bloom window
- Where the year sags
- The gap is worth more than the peak
- Nectar plants and pollen plants
- Willow, the first pollen
- Phacelia, six weeks from seed
- Borage
- Sowing for a date
- A strip sown too late
- White clover in the grass
- A meadow takes two years
- Lavender is for the bees, not the jar
- Heather, the gap's own honey
- Fruit trees and the years before blossom
- A lime tree for the next keeper
- Black locust
- Ivy on the fence
- Nothing to water, nothing dies
- What a planting can name on the jar
- Siting the hive matters more
A colony forages a circle about two kilometres in radius, and that circle holds roughly 1,260 hectares. A quarter hectare of the best bee plant there is makes one part in about five thousand of it. Even a famous bee crop is reckoned at a few hundred kilos of honey a hectare, and that is what the flowers secrete, shared with every bee and hoverfly in the parish, not what one apiary brings home.
So a planting is a nudge, not a harvest. What already grows in the circle decides most of a colony's year, which is why a keeper who can choose where the hives stand gains more than one who plants beside them.