How to Plant Food Plots for Honey Bees

Honey bees enjoy any kind of flowering plant which produces nectar. Suitable honey bee food plots may range from sunflowers to flowering alfalfa. A beekeeper must make a determination about the quality of honey desired. Different types of flowering plants cause varying flavor nuances in extracted honey. Although it isn't economically feasible to plant enough flowers to provide all of the honey, it is wise to plant two-to-four acre plots near the bee hives to assist in regulating the flavor and the weight of the honey that will be produced during any given season.

Things You'll Need

• Two to four acres of your own privately owned land, or with lease rights
• Leased tractor with tilling disc implement
• Leased tractor-pulled soil packer
• Leased tractor-pulled 8-row planter
• Irrigation system for flower field, well-drawn or gravity-fed irrigation preferred
• One 50-pound bag of desired seed per planting acre

Instructions

1. Determine the flavor nuances you desire in your honey. Light-weight and aromatic honey is generally developed by giving the bees a diet of purple lavender; a medium-weight full-bodied honey is obtained by feeding the bees on red rose and morning glories. If you desire a heavy-weight honey with both sweet and slightly bitter qualities, grow marigolds, alfalfa or dandelions.

2. Lease a small farm tractor, disc, packer and planter from your local farm implement distributor, leasing them near the time of the last projected frost for your area. Adjust your personal schedule to minimize the amount of time you need to lease the equipment for maximum cost savings--generally one week is sufficient for two to four acres.

3. Connect the disc to the tractor and till the soil well. Drive the tractor north and south first, covering every square inch of your owned or leased land, and then do the same only in an east and west direction.

4. Disconnect the disc, connect the packer implement to the tractor and pack the entire acreage for a smooth planting surface.

5. Disconnect the packer implement and connect the 8-row planter. Distribute a 50-pound bag of plant seed evenly into each of the planter's seed buckets, per acre, and plant.

6. Install your chosen method of irrigation for operation upon your land, and lightly irrigate your newly planted seeds to provide adequate germination moisture. Once the seedlings emerge, irrigate them in a fashion so that the entire area has been covered once throughout each week, continuing throughout the entire beekeeping season through honey harvest.

Tips & Warnings

• Bees have a tendency to fly up to five miles from their hives looking for all flowering plants and water sources. It is recommended that you have ownership or lease rights to the minimum two-to-four acres mentioned in this article if you desire enough land mass in flowers to make adjustments to your honey flavor. Any less of an acreage would not make a difference, as the majority of nectar would still be coming from outside of your immediate hive location(s).

• This article assumes you know how to operate the mentioned farm equipment. However, if you are strictly a beekeeper and have no working knowledge of how to operate the mentioned equipment, offer to pay a local farmer to perform the tilling and the planting for you. In some cases, this will be less expensive than leasing equipment yourself.

References

• National Honey Board: Honey Color and Flavor - Flowering Plants and Types
• Agricultural Research Service, Dept. of Agriculture: Bee Biology Resources and Study White Papers
• Homesteading Resource: Growing and Surviving Off the Land