Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => DOWN UNDER BEEKEEPING => Topic started by: malachii on May 25, 2011, 10:13:41 am
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A friend of mine lives next door to a daffodil farm and offered me a space to put some of my hives there. Do bees like daffodils and if so - what sort of honey does it make?
malachii
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I've not seen bees on my daffodils, not that I have all that many of them. That time of year they are on the crocuses, though...
Even if bees to forage on daffodils, they are typically one of the earliest flowers, and because they are so early it is unlikely that you'd get any extra honey off them, for 2 reasons...1) population is the lowest then, and 2) because the early honey will go to building up the hive and brood production.
The bigger question to me would be if there is plenty of other non-daffodil flowers and forage in the area. The flowering time on daffodils is short so you need something blooming the rest of the summer for the bees to produce any surplus.
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this is a quote from the peace bee farm blog "Daffodils are early-blooming perennial flowers that do not often attract honey bees. However, this week I found large numbers of bees foraging for pollen in daffodils. These flowers marked the location of a long-abandoned home site in the margin of the woods. The bees would fly directly into the large bell of the flowers’ coronas and emerge with pollen."
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I read that as most are now the result of years of breeding for bloom quality, some have little or no nectar.
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But they are nice to look at.
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Especially when there is 'a host of golden daffodils'.