honey flow

[Matthias Smith]

I don't know if this was asked before but how much of a honey flow would you expect from a few acres of wild raspberry ,wild rose and wild black berry/dewberry ?

[franc]

Not very much it really helps the berries produce but the bloom is usually short.Combined the plants will help build up the hive but I wouldn't expect a large harvest from just those plants.

[Lew Best]

what else is around you? bees forage a much larger radius than your land.

Lew

[Michael Bush]

Let's see, the typical foraging area (and they will ocassionally go farther) is a two mile radius. The formula for the area of a circle is Pi R squared. So 3.14 * 2 * 2 = 12.56 sqaure miles * 640 acres per sqaure mile = 8038 acres around their hive they will forage. There's a lot of blooms in that much area.

[Dan Williamson]

>>how much of a honey flow would you expect from a few acres of wild raspberry ,wild rose and wild black berry/dewberry ?

Check out the May issue of ABJ. There is a whole section that discusses these plants. My 3 acres is full of wild blackberry and the bees are working it like crazy. I think alot of it depends on the strength of your hives this time of year. If conditions are right and you have very strong hives I think that you can expect a decent flow and some surplus. I expect to get some surplus from them this spring. My 2 strongest hives are bringing in alot of nectar from my 3 acres.

Dan

[Michael Bush]

>My 2 strongest hives are bringing in alot of nectar from my 3 acres.

Or from the 8,000 acres around it.

[Dan Williamson]

>>Or from the 8,000 acres around it.

Oh how true..... the nice thing is that in my area there are wild blackberries everywhere even in the woods under pretty decent canopies. And there are alot more blackberries in the 8000 acres around me than in my 3 acres. I have mostly corn fields around me but all the hedgerows are full of white flowers on the wildblackberries. There may be (and probably are)some other plants blooming but everywhere I look I mostly see wild blackberries in bloom.

Of course there is no way to prove that the majority of the nectar is coming from the blackberries but I'd say there is a pretty good chance that a good portion of it is coming from them. Blackberries bloomed on May 13th and in the past week they have started drawing 2 supers of foundation in each hive at the same time and storing nectar in both supers.

Frankly, I don't care where it is coming from as long as they are finding it.... ;)

Dan

[Branman]

In Georgia, blackberries are a major source of nectar. Probably top two in terms of production along with tulip poplar