The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 6 of 21
Willow, the first pollen
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
Goat willow flowers in March and April, catkins on bare twigs before a leaf is out. Willows are male or female, and it is the male catkins that turn yellow with pollen. Hazel catkins are out earlier still, from late January, with pollen and no nectar at all. Neither gives a crop worth the name.
What they give is the first pollen of the year. A colony can rear brood without pollen only for a fortnight or so before the larvae go hungry, and bee bread is kept a couple of months at most. If the queen lays up before any real pollen comes in, the brood nest stalls. Colonies fed pollen in spring rear more brood and grow faster.
A willow is planted for that, not for honey. In this game it opens on Mar 3, gives almost no nectar, and flowers three years after planting.