The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 16 of 21
A lime tree for the next keeper
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 lime, or linden, grown from seed usually flowers somewhere between five and fifteen years old. When it does, the whole crown comes out almost at once in June or July, and for a few days to two weeks the tree hums. The honey is pale with a green cast, minty and woody, and carries a moderate premium.
It is not dependable. A lime flowers more heavily in some years than others, and the weather decides how long a short bloom lasts and how much nectar it gives.
Nobody plants a lime for themselves. You plant it because a keeper will stand under it long after you. In this game a lime flowers with the wild limes from eight years after planting and keeps flowering for a hundred years.