The Plants
Bee Sustainable™ is up and running with four working hives on 80 acres of fallow (uncultivated)
land owned by The Chef’s Garden in Milan, Ohio. Working with Dr. James Tew, director of The Ohio State University Bee Lab, we reproduced an ideal honeybee habitat here at The Chef’s Garden by selecting specific cover crops that provide bees with varied, nutritional sources of nectar. Since native pollinators typically have multiple flowering choices in the spring but must scavenge for nectar in the summer, we scheduled plantings of these varieties to ensure a constant blooming source throughout the warm seasons.
The plants chosen for Bee Sustainable also have additional benefits to the environment. A plant absorbs Carbon Dioxide and produces Oxygen through photosynthesis, replenishing Carbon that has been depleted from the ground and decreasing greenhouse gases in the air. Forty-two million seeds can be planted on one acre of fallow land, resulting in 20 million miles of roots that could encircle the Earth 810 times. Clearly, the 80-acre Bee Sustainable plot has significant Carbon-sequestering power.