Benefits of Bees
The Benefits of Hosting Beehives on Your Land
Hosting our hives on your land brings a number of benefits.
The most obvious is enhanced pollination of your flowering crops, which could include harvestable crops like oilseed rape, beans, fruit of all kinds, or sown cover crops and nitrogen-fixers such as various clovers, mustard, kale, phacelia, buckwheat, radish, and other sown flowers.
There’s also the natural forage from trees, hedgerows, and field margins where wildflowers occur, which the bees will work on as well.
The enhancement in both the quantity and quality of yields in harvestable crops has been well known for a long time, but outside of fruit crops, it was often undervalued as a minor benefit. Nowadays, with tighter margins, even a small uplift is helpful.
Better seed set on natural flora and certain cover crops provides more fruit and seed, which in turn benefits a wide range of birds and other wildlife. More birds – particularly species that attract customers to the land – are a benefit that can enhance a farm or estate’s bottom line.
Crops like mustard and phacelia are very nutritious for the bees themselves, though they probably don’t add much value to the farm, as seed set isn’t required for these crops. However, better-fed bees will do a better job on subsequent target crops.
The bees, therefore, enhance pollination activities on the land, which has ecological benefits for all: more food, more wildlife, and a healthier environment.
For Farmers and Growers
We’re always keen to engage with farmers, growers, contractors, landowners, and estates. We’re constantly on the lookout for new locations and ground where we can place hives, and for crops that may be going unpollinated or, from our side, unexploited.
Mostly, we’re seeking seasonal locations where we can migrate in for the crop and then move on to the next. This usually means we’ll come in spring, place bees on your target crops, and move them off to the heather before harvest time.
We typically operate within the range of the Lothians up to Aberdeenshire, moving the bees to hundreds of locations a year. We’re always keen to hear from you, so please get in touch directly by email or phone, or complete the contact form.
We also place bees on heather estates, and some long-experienced gamekeepers have stated that bees on the moor improve heather seed set, which provides more food for the grouse in winter and results in a healthier moor due to increased seed load in the ground.
For those outside our usual range: if you have a large acreage of crop(s) or natural forage and no suitable bee supply, please get in touch. We’re able to travel long distances for the right environment to place bees. Whether owned, co-owned, or managed, we’re open to various venture structures.
We also like to use low-altitude locations for wintering the bees. These are only brought in, fed, treated for diseases, and then largely left alone until spring. The bees are inactive over the winter months and won’t cause any inconvenience to you or your visitors, such as winter shooting parties.