The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 21 of 21
Siting the hive matters more
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
Go back to the circle. About 1,260 hectares, and four plots make one hectare. Whatever grows across the rest, the hedges, the fields, a moor two valleys over, sets the shape of a colony's year far more than anything a keeper sows.
That is why experienced keepers spend more thought on where hives stand than on what they plant. A hive within reach of a heather moor or a lime avenue has something no plot can give it. Land of your own and out-apiaries change the circle itself; a plot changes a speck of it.
Plant anyway, for the gap and for the spring pollen.