We have a huge basswood at the edge of the yard.  It shades part of the garden in the late afternoon, but pays for itself in the middle of June when the flowers open up and feed every insect within a few mile radius.  I'm not exaggerating here --- before we got our honeybees, the basswood attracted so many bees from our neighbor's hives that it hummed like a not-so-distant highway.

Like many nectar trees, basswood can't be depended on to bloom every year.  It often blooms heavily one year, skips the next year, then works back up to a heavy bloom over the next few years.  Our tree took last year off, and this year seems to be only blooming at about 50%.

But even 50% seems to be a lot of nectar, and our honeybees are going crazy.  I'll be harvesting more honey today since I suspect our bees will fill up their supers in short order with the current basswood flow.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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