The Year The Clover Didn’t Come

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By: Kara Brook Brown

In May I sat in my truck at the edge of a forty acre field and did arithmetic I did not want to do.

The clover was gone. Not thin, not slow, gone. After close to twenty years on this ground you develop an instinct for the difference, and this stand had failed. The clover block is the anchor of our whole season. In a normal year it gives us our heaviest Summer flow, somewhere between 100 and 150 pounds per hive of the best clover and wildflower honey we make. I sat there adding up what its absence would cost, and the numbers were ugly.

Then the season went and fixed itself in a way I never saw coming. But let me back up first.

Growing the Bloom Instead of Chasing It
We farm 102 acres on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and about 40 of them go into the ground every year for our bees. That is the short version of what makes our operation different. Most beekeepers move their bees toward the bloom. We grow the bloom and leave the bees where they are.

The mix has changed a lot over the years. My beekeeping mentor, Michael Embrey, taught me about crimson clover as a Winter cover, and we tried a patch one year. It puts on a beautiful show. Regular Dutch white and yellow clover are the backbone, and the best year we ever had came in perfectly timed for a wedding we hosted on the property in late May. We have used buckwheat because it establishes fast, though it makes the honey very dark and some folks are averse to a strong tasting honey. Bee balm is one of my favorite shows on the farm. It seems to move and stretch across the property in different ways each year and blooms all the way through the back end of the season.

We ran mustard for two years and then pulled it. It looked like a smart diversity addition in year one and was taking over by year three, and it made the honey taste bad. The bees loved it. Nobody else did. Research every component before you sow it, from what it does to your land to what it does to your flavor.

We keep the fields chemical free. We have to, for the bees, and our location near the Chesapeake puts us in no-till country anyway. Weed control runs roughly three to five times what a conventional herbicide program would cost, and being chemical free and non-GMO made us unattractive to the local contract farmers. So we bought our own equipment years earlier than planned, and with labor short everywhere, we run a rotation of people who help.

The Year it Fell Apart
We seeded the clover in April the way we always do. There is a natural Canada goose migration through our farm. The geese have been here longer than we have, and they help themselves to at least half our seed every year, which is why we overseed. This Spring the stand came up thin and patchy, and then mostly not at all.

The weather was strange. Early heat, then temperatures dropping below freezing as many as four times. Was it the seeding window, the weather after sowing, the germination itself? We still are not sure. Every year is an adventure, and this one delivered me to the edge of that field with a calculator.

Then it Rained and Stormed
The hot weather set in differently this year. Every dramatically hot spell was followed by a torrential thunderstorm. And for the first time ever, wildflowers came in like nothing I have seen on this farm.

Every storm brought another wave. Normally June and July drought is what kills us, and you cannot recover from drought in a wildflower field. The storms arriving every few days erased the annual drought entirely, and it was a welcome surprise. Our resident meadow man, consulting ecologist Jeff Wolinski, has built sections of wildflower across the property for different reasons. Some suit the areas that hold water. Some are sturdy flowers indigenous to our region. Some are experiments, like the secret society of the borage, a non-native the bees adore. For years those patches would put on a decent show and fade after a week. Not this year. Week after week, bloom and rebloom.

The fruit trees joined in too. I have never seen so many pears on our old orchard, which is over forty years standing. The sight took my breath away. The old apple orchard is winding down, but the newer one we planted closer to the house did surprisingly well.

By late July, at least ten acres of wildflowers had covered a good share of what the clover cost us. The honey is not clover honey and I will not call it that. I name our honey by season, Spring and Chesterhaven, and this crop is the record of a hot, wet, strange year on this piece of land. I have come to like it a great deal.

My paycheck every year is the very waxy honey that falls to the bottom of my uncapping tank. I pull wax from about thirty percent of the frames we process to recycle and reinvent from scratch, and while it sits in my workroom the honey separates from the wax. I bottle that honey especially for us. It has wax in it. It has bee parts in it. It crystallizes over time. Sharing it with friends and family, when I am feeling overly generous, is my favorite part of this job.

What the Season Taught Us
I have been telling people for years to diversify their plantings. I believed it the way you believe advice you have never had to use. This year I had to use it.

The wildflower acreage looked like a nice diversity gesture for a decade. This year it was the operation. If your whole forage plan rests on one crop, you do not have a plan. You have a bet.

The same idea applies across the calendar. Early, mid and late season bloom means something is always open, and spreading plantings across the farm keeps one bad pocket of weather from finding all of it. Right now the persimmons are coming on, and passionflower is appearing wherever the birds have dropped seed. The flower is beautiful even when the fruit that follows is incomplete.

We also budget for loss before it happens. We pencil in about 25 percent crop loss to deer every year. We learned that the expensive way, when a herd of more than twenty worked through thirty acres of sunflowers in about two days and took the entire crop. Building loss into the projection is what let this spring be a hard season instead of a crisis.

What We Did Not Lose
Twenty years of clover and rotations have steadily improved this soil, though it remains a work in progress. More organic matter, better water retention, less need for outside nitrogen. That work does not undo itself in one bad season.

The habitat held too. Once the plantings matured we started seeing far more than honey bees out there. Native solitary bees, monarchs on the milkweed, predatory insects handling pests we used to worry about, and the birds that feed on all of them. A field managed for pollinators becomes habitat for a whole web of things, whether or not the clover cooperates in any given year. Back when the deer let us raise sunflowers, I would find more kinds of bees, butterflies and winged creatures in one afternoon than I could name.

For Anyone Thinking About Planting Forage
Start with five or ten acres and get them right before you expand.

Write everything down. Weather, bloom dates, what the bees were working and when. Memory is not good enough across seasons, and the record is what tells you whether a bad year is a pattern or an accident.

Build the network. Local beekeepers, native plant people, and the farmer down the road will save you from mistakes you would otherwise pay for twice. An annual session with our consulting ecologist has done more for our management than almost anything else we spend money on.

And plan to adapt, because your first plan will not be your last. I have had close to twenty years on this ground and this season still surprised me. The clover failed. The wildflowers came in with every storm, endlessly. Both things are true about the same 102 acres in the same twelve months.

Kara Brook Brown is the founder of Bee Inspired® Goods and keeps bees at Chesterhaven Beach Farm, a 102-acre farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where she plants roughly 40 acres of pollinator forage each year.

To learn more about Kara’s Bee Inspired Business, visit: https://beeinspiredgoods.com/