A 2KM HEDGE!

The conventional wisdom among Beekeepers suggests that a single beehive needs access to, at least, one acre of flowering plants, or trees that flower, to thrive. This sounds about right, if you could break that up into different plants giving nectar and pollen consistently over three seasons in a bell curve. If you, like me, don’t think in acres or bushels or whatnot, imagine a packed square of blossoms that’s 63.25m wide. That would be just over 4000 square metres by area (or 43,000 sq feet) .

But, we don’t deal in neat squares, do we? In West Wales, our bees are particularly reliant on the flowering blackberry or bramble that flowers prodigiously in our farmland hedges. To visualise the scale of requirements here, if a kindly farmer’s hedge is the regulation 2m wide, then a single beehive could readily utilise a green isthmus a full 2km in length (or, let’s say, about one and a quarter miles in old money). And, that’s the minimum.

Clearly a lot of forage and a whole lot of flights!

(Note, this sum is intended for fun and illustration and may ignore significant variables and/or reality. Production of honey in quantity would require more area. No bees were harmed in the making of these calculations).
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