The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 20 of 21
What a planting can name on the jar
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 jar carries a plant's name when that plant made most of what is in the box. This game draws the line at 60 percent of a super's kilos from one plant, the same rule the forage book taught, and a planting obeys it like any wild flower.
Most plantings flower beside something bigger, so their nectar is a share of the box, not most of it. A strip of phacelia or a lavender bed goes in as wildflower. Clover, lime and black locust add to their wild namesakes and can help a clover, linden or acacia super over the line.
In this game only one planting names a honey on its own, and only because so little else is in flower when it opens. Heather in the August gap can make a heather super where the same patches in June would vanish into the flow.