The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 18 of 21
Ivy on the fence
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
Ivy is the last flow of the year, flowering from September into November. Most bees on the flowers are after its nectar, which is nearly half sugar. Only adult ivy flowers: stems that have climbed to the top of their support and into the light, which in a garden normally takes around ten years.
It is no harvest. Ivy honey sets hard in the comb, often before it can be spun out, and little of it sells. What it gives is winter stores, and pollen at the very end of the year.
This game shortens the wait: ivy on the fence flowers three years after planting, lightly the first autumn.