The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 5 of 21
Nectar plants and pollen plants
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 plant can feed a colony in two ways, and they are two different jobs. Nectar is sugar: fuel for flying and the raw stuff of honey and winter stores. Pollen is protein. Nurse bees eat it to make brood food, and rearing one worker larva takes somewhere around 124 to 145 milligrams of it.
At any time only about a sixth to three in ten of the foragers are out for pollen, and a colony keeps little of it in store. When pollen stops coming in, brood rearing slows and then stops, however full the honey frames are.
So some plantings are for the jar and some are for the bees. In this game each planting says how much pollen it gives in plain words, from little to plenty, beside its nectar.