I came across this photo of 24 wild white clover sections and thought about it. There were beekeepers (3 brothers) who lived locally at Crookham who constantly selected their queens for excellence and this included the bees ability to make a perfect job of sealing their sections. It was never easy to persuade bees to work sections and there would be a great number of Italian queens brought into the area at that time (1950s). The bees belonging to the Italian queens would seal their sections in a craggy manner with half the wax opaque (very thin).
To fill the sections to this standard the bees would need a heavy honey flow from indigenous clover. This would be quite common given that this plant was the basis of agriculture in the early part of the 20th century throughout Great Britain. The clover fixed nitrogen that in turn grew grass to feed cattle and sheep which then provided manure for arable crops. Basic slag (lime) which was a by-product of the steelworks was spread on the fields and was released into the soil over a period of up to 7 years. Beekeepers did very well out of this situation and I am thinking of Brother Adam, Manley, Rowse and Madoc in Norfolk, with thousands of hives between them.
After the war a process, which had been devised by German Scientists, was used to convert liquid natural gas into ammonia and was taken up in the UK by ICI maybe (reparations? I don’t really know) to make nitrogenous fertiliser. This gradually spelt the end of wild white clover (now renowned the world over!) and with it a very reliable source of nectar. At present nitrogenous fertiliser costs £800.00/tonne up from £200.00/tonne and farmers are rightly concerned about the future. A lot of nitrogen put on the land ran into the water courses and was wasted. It was possible to grow big crops on land that had lost all its organic material and had become sterile. I find that farmers are now carting compost from the cities and any other organic material that is available to try and improve the soil and get it back to where it was in 1960, an impossible target.
In our area several farms have gone organic and are planting hybrid clovers that rarely yield any nectar. I would be very happy if they all went organic because the land that supports us may begin to recover and the bees would be free from unwanted chemical ‘inputs’.
Nitrogenous manure would keep a lot of people in the world from starvation, but in this country it caused overproduction of food that was far too cheap, much of which was thrown into landfill. I did hear of milk that was being sold for half the price of bottled water. Not any longer, I think.
