The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 17 of 21
Black locust
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
Black locust hangs white racemes in late spring and early summer, and bees work them hard. A young tree starts to flower and seed at about six years old, bears best between fifteen and forty, and keeps going to about sixty. Its honey is the one the trade calls acacia: very pale, very mild, and slow to set.
A planted locust flowers when the wild ones do, at the crest of the main flow, with clover in the grass underneath. It is a tree for a keeper who wants acacia honey and already has hives strong enough to take a big flow. It does nothing for the gap.
In this game a black locust flowers from mid-May, six years after planting, alongside the wild locusts, and is worn out after sixty.