What the bees told us about the hedgerow

We planted the boundary for windbreak and shade. Those were the reasons on the plan and they were good enough reasons on their own — wind takes moisture off a bed faster than sun does, and a hedge that cuts it pays for itself in irrigation before it pays for itself in anything else.

The hives were a separate decision, sited at the forest edge because that was where there was room.

The thing we did not plan

Within two seasons the boundary was carrying flower for a longer stretch of the year than the orchard was. Not more flower — the orchard wins that easily for three weeks in the spring — but longer, because a mixed hedge of indigenous species does not have a single flowering date. Something in it is always going.

That turns out to matter more than volume. A colony does not need a spectacular fortnight; it needs never to have a hungry one. And the months where our bees would otherwise have gone hungry are exactly the dry months when nothing we planted deliberately is in flower.

What we changed as a result

• We stopped cutting the boundary tidy. A hedge trimmed to a line flowers less, because most species flower on second-year wood.
• We added species for the gaps rather than for the peaks — anything that flowers in July and August went in, whether or not it was useful otherwise.
• We moved two hives to the western belt, which we had assumed was the poorer side and which the bees had evidently decided otherwise about.

The general lesson

We had drawn the boundary as infrastructure — a line on a plan whose job was to stop wind. It was doing that. It was also doing three other things nobody had asked it to, and the only reason we found out is that we happened to have put a colony of very good surveyors next to it.

Nothing on this farm has one job. The difficulty is that we usually only design for the job we thought of.

Most of what we now believe about the food forest started as an observation about honey.