Tonight, the apiary echoed Emily Dickinson. “to make a prairie it takes clover and a bee/one clover, and a bee/and reverie…” I was fond of that poem the first time I read it. I liked the illusions of dreams fulfilling realities and the painless repetition of sounds. For a moment, I realized that I was living inside of that poem. A box of bees—a second on the way, a field of clover beginning to bloom, and living the reality of what my child-self had once pined for during lazy summer afternoons.

I haven’t really taken the time to talk about the location of my apiary, which is funny because location is such an important factor in the wellbeing and survival of bees. Location specifics such as topography, water resources, wind flow, and flower populations will not only impact the lives of the bees but also the production rate of honey as well as the taste of said honey.

This apiary’s location is in Blair, Nebraska at my family’s farmland. The hive entrances face east and have plenty of early morning sun and late afternoon shade. The field that they reside in is fairly unpopulated and sees little traffic. Every couple weeks in the summer, a local farmer brings his cows to this field to graze. For these occasions, we built a shoulder-height fence surrounding the boxes to steer curious cows away from the hives. For the past 40 some years it has been overgrown with clover, which is ideally a perfect pollen source for the bees, but because of the cows, I am not expecting mono-flora honey. Mono-flora/single origin honeys are required to have at least 51% of a specific type of nectar and chances of finding that within any hives we might place on the land is unlikely.