White Clover and Honey Bees

Image by CathyUser from Pixabay

I need to correct myself. Back a few days ago I made a video talking about a technique that could possibly help to increase your nectar flow and in the process I said something that I have since learned is incorrect. I said that even if you have an acre of clover growing in your yard it will not increase your honey production much, if any at all. Well, guess what! I was wrong!! Turns out that leaving your clover filled yard uncut could in fact impact your honey yield. And quite nicely.

 I have been doing some reading from different studies done on clover by different universities. Here are just a few of the universities I have read studies from:
     1. Louisiana State University
     2. Texas A&M
     3. University of California
     4. Mississippi State
These are just a few of them, but they are the main ones I gleaned good relevant info from. I found the information so enlightening, especially how it pertains to my earlier post, that I wanted to share it with you here.

This Might Not Pertain To You

This article may actually not pertain to you if you are a commercial beekeeper. If you are running 400+ colonies at one location you may indeed need to pursue different options such as feeding sugar water. This article is geared towards the new beekeeper and the smaller operator. I cannot accurately put a number on the amount of hives you can run and still see an impact, but I will say that the amount of production per acre is significant enough that you will at least be able to stop putting money into so much sugar for feeding. 

Also, if you are running 2-10 hives at your place and are convinced that you need to feed your bees sugar water because you read it in a book or you saw some guy on YouTube feeding his bees sugar water, please consider that persons situation. Many of the guys writing books and making YouTube videos are running many hundreds if not many thousands of hives and feeding is necessary for their situation. You do not need to purchase sugar to feed your bees except in emergency situations. I will talk about those situations at a later time in another post. For now I think it is very important that you always remember that beekeeping 20 miles from you in any direction has different requirements than beekeeping on your property. 

All in all I believe that the info in this post can be helpful to any and all beekeepers no matter how big they get,  but I am not one to say that my way is the best way, nor the only way to do it. I am merely making observations and suggestions. I could very well be wrong. Take what you can. 

How You Can Stop Feeding Bees

This writer is assuming that you have at least an acre or two of land available. I know it is not unusual for people to keep bees on a much smaller setting, but I feel that the majority of beekeepers, at least those that are local to me, have a couple of acres at their disposal. This is in no way an attempt to exclude anyone on small lots. There are ways you too can participate in what I am explaining. You may just need to get creative. 

My recent research has changed my thinking on clover, specifically Dutch Clover. It is a real treasure for the bees as well as the beekeeper. One acre of clover can produce 250 to 500 pounds of honey per growing season. Now if you are selling your honey at $8 per pound, a fair price in my opinion, one acre of land planted in clover should yield a beekeeper about $4000 in a year. There are many variables to this like wind, rainfall amounts, colony buildup, competing forage and so forth. 

The amount of extra forage this gives the bees is only a part of its impact on the colony.  Keep in mind that the honey bee works herself to death....literally! How? By constantly traveling large distances to gather her payload and bring it back to the hive. I live on just a few acres of land. I have not yet planted clover here and there is little to no forage on my land except during to fall flow which has just started. About a mile away there is a 100 acre field that is normally covered in clover in the Spring. My bees will fly that mile several times a day to get their payload of nectar and then carry it back to the hive. Although this is productive, it is not as efficient as they could be given better opportunity. Lets just say that one bee can make 5 trips a day to the field a mile away. The average lifespan of a honey bee during the nectar flow is about 5 weeks. Bees are not inherently lazy therefore they never take a day off. Now I'm gonna be real liberal here and say that the entire five weeks of life is spent just foraging for nectar. This is not reality, but for this scenario we will let it be. If our little honey bee makes 5 trips a day for her entire life and is not interrupted by high winds or rain she will have made 125 trips with a payload for the colony. A honey bee can carry as much as 100mg of nectar, but she has to consume some for fuel. She actually leaves the hive with only enough honey in her crop to fuel her trip. Once to the clover field she will start filling her tank full to the 100mg maximum. Then, once full, she starts her trip back to the hive consuming some of her payload along the way for flight fuel. By the time she returns she will only have 20-60mg left to convert to honey. In this case where she is flying a mile away she will likely have about 50-60mg left as her total payload. Keep in mind bees will forage for many miles. The further they go, the more they will use.

So that scenario is not the most efficient. The most efficient use of their short life will not only give the bees more maxed out payloads, it may even lengthen their lives by a week or two which will in turn increase hive strength giving you more field bees to bring in more food stores. How do you make their work more efficient? By planting clover over your unused acreage. Yes it is true that if you have enough bees in the area they will exhaust those resources fairly early in the day, but at least they had those close resources to gather first thing before going greater distances in search of food. And if you are running only a handful of hives they may not exhaust a couple of acres before the clover that was hit first thing in the morning secretes new nectar creating a loop effect and giving the bees another round of high quality food for their efforts. 

A Remarkable Symbiosis

The relationship between honey bees and clover is truly remarkable. They literally need each other for survival long term. Although honey bees can exist without clover, their existence is greatly improved when clover is available. But for clover, pollination by honey bees or other insect pollinators is imperative. Without it they cease to thrive. I have actually witnessed clover completely disappear from our local fields once the honey bees disappeared. 

Let me share with you how this came about. Back in the 1970's when I was a young boy I remember there being all sorts of bees here where I grew up. I still live on the land where I grew up 40+ years later. There were honey bees here in the area. They were mostly wild although a neighbor less than a mile away was a beekeeper of a single colony. You could walk out in the woods and find bees in trees on a regular basis. The cattle pastures were all full of clover. White, red, and yellow clovers were everywhere. They may have indeed been planted at some point, but for the most part they would reseed themselves because of the bee population in the area. 

Then, by the late 1980's and into the 1990's the bees just kind of disappeared from the area. Along with them I noticed that the clover was not growing in the fields as much. It was once even abundant on the roadsides, but that too was disappearing. Now, it is nearly nonexistent. You may see a patch here and there, but it is not like it once was. At one time it was everywhere. So what happened and why?

I have my thoughts on what happened to the bees. I personally think it had a lot to do with the timber companies. They spray pesticides over the pine forests these days to reduce the competition given to the young trees by the underbrush. Underbrush that would otherwise be forage for the honey bee. No forage = no wild bees. Another possibility is that the logging companies are added competition for the bees in that bees like to find old hollowed out trees to live in. These days trees in the wild are harvested younger and younger reducing the availability of shelter for wild bees. I am not against logging or the timber industry. I just am explaining what I  see as being a small part of a much bigger problem with the bees. 

Now, why did the clover seemingly disappear with the disappearance of the bees? Simply put, if the honey bees (the most effective pollinator of the clover) are diminished, the clove will in turn diminish. It has to be pollinated in order to give off fertile seed. If the seeds are not fertile, they will not germinate and grow. It is a slow process, but this is how it seems to play out. First, the bees leave the area. They leave behind other pollinators that can do the job, such as bumble bees, but they are not as thorough as the honey bees. Lets just say that they may be only half as effective in their pollination efforts. That means next year you can expect a 50% germination rate, meaning that only half of the clover is reseeded. Repeat this for a few years and eventually there is not enough clover flowering to attract any of the insect pollinators resulting in the clover dying of never returning until someone like you decides to start planting it from seed. This is exactly why the relationship between clover and honey bees is so remarkable!

What You Can Do

I am going to repeat something I have said on a previous post. You can improve your forage in your area, and I don't care where it is you live, there are still opportunities.

If you are a beekeeper you really need to consider keeping a few pounds of  clover seed on hand. This is what I recommend:
Outsidepride White Dutch Clover Seed: Nitro-Coated, Inoculated - 5 LBS

And here is what you can do. For clover to germinate properly the temps need to be in the sixties. It will germinate in a wide range of temps, but the lower 60's are preferable. I recently got some advice from an old farmer at a feed store. He told me that here in my part of Louisiana clover needs to be broadcast planted starting in the last week of September through October and all the way up until the first frost. Here that can be anywhere from late October all the way to December. You can also plant it in the Spring when the temps are getting right again. The old man didn't advise me on Spring planting.
You should also try to plant it right before a rain. You don't want to broadcast your seed only to give ants and other bugs several days or weeks to carry it away and end up with one big spot of clover growing in your field, that spot being where the ants stored it in their mound. It is and has been extremely dry here. I am planting it in my field in an area that can be watered by a sprinkler for a week, then moving the sprinkler to another spot and planting that area, watering it for a week. I'll keep doing this until the first frost, or until I have planted my entire 10 pounds of seed. Keep in mind if you decide to do this a pound of clover seed is enough to cover a few thousand square feet. And as long as you have honey bees it will spread by seed each year due to their pollination.
If you don't have a large yard or any amount of acreage to start this on your own property, start looking at other options. I talked about this in another post, but consider highway and backroad easements. The sides of these roads are usually maintained by the state or county. Clover is the only seed I recommend distributing on the roadways. I do not recommend doing this without checking with the DOT(Department of Transportation) in you area about the legality of broadcasting seed on the roadsides, but I don't see why they would have a problem with it. You also need to consider your safety along the roadsides. I just think that the roadsides give you miles of acreage that you can put to use for your bees even if you don't have acreage of your own.
Another way to accomplish getting some clover established in your area is to go to neighbors who do have acreage and ask them to consider letting you distribute some seed in their fields. Its always good to have some bribe-honey on hand when asking for these types of things.
If you live in town and there is limited area for you to do this there may not be a need for you to fret about it. I find that beekeepers living in town usually have good forage for bees. Nearly every home in a neighborhood has landscaping and flowerbeds. This gives your bees plenty of forage. Many times while other beekeepers are in a nectar dearth you city-dwellers will still have some exotic flowerbed forage for your bees. But, if you still want to find places to distribute clover your best bet will be looking for vacant lots and finding out who owns them. This could be as simple as asking the owners of the adjacent lot or as difficult as going to the courthouse and looking it up in their files.
I think I have given you enough information here to get you started. Get creative with finding places to distribute your clover seed.

One Last Thing

In your quest to establish new clover forage, don't be discouraged  by the price of clover seed. Yes it can be expensive, especially when looking at planting large areas. There are things you need to consider when planting your seed that may not be at the forefront of your mind right now. You do not need to cover an entire area with seed. Keep in mind that with the relationship the bees have with the clover in pollination, your clover should get pollinated therefore making viable seeds for next year helping the clover to spread into larger patches. Granted, you are not going to "cover the planet in clover", nor should you want to, but you can permanently reduce the amount of feeding you are doing and you can put this into motion for next year RIGHT NOW!

You also don't need to concern yourself too much with the cost of clover seed because it is very reasonable to collect the flowers and distribute them by the bag full in new unseeded areas. For those who are conscious of cost this process should be very appealing. But remember, no matter how you proceed just get started. Plant some clover this Fall. Plant some more next Spring. Feed your bees naturally!

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EDIT: The argument that deer forage on clover and that would encourage them to come to the roadside can be made. I personally think it lacks merit since deer in this area forage along the roads every night. Still, you may want to factor this into your decision making.