The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 2 of 21
Reading a bloom window
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
Every plant flowers for a stretch of days, and that stretch is its window. A window is not a switch. The first flowers open thinly, the plant builds to its fullest in the middle, and the last flowers fade over the final days. The days at either end count for much less than the days in the middle.
The useful way to read a window is against the year's nectar, not on its own. Phacelia out for six weeks in May sits under a flow that is already rising; the same six weeks in August sits over almost nothing. The plant is the same and its worth to the hive is not.
In this game every planting is drawn as a bar over the curve of your year's nectar, rising and fading at each end.