It’s a bit of a guessing game being a farmer, they may well have a reputation of moaning a fair amount: too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, but who can blame them when they are in the hands of the weather gods?

Like trying to work out the optimum time to order your bees … I didn’t even know you could order bees? But yes, apparently you can, and you need to judge it just right, as they need to be released when the blossom is out about 30% for optimum pollination and in order to make sure there is enough food for them.

Chatting to the farmer at my local cherry farm he told me that he orders 150 triple hives every year, which is enough to cover the 80 acres of cherries. A triple hive being a large cardboard box with three hives inside containing approximately 300 native bees.

These are then placed amongst the orchards; the little slots opened up and off they go about their work, no other maintenance required!

They have 100 permanent hives dotted around the farm for the honey bees so bumblebees are the ones they order in, bumblebees fly across the tunnels to their hives whereas honey bees fly up and out the tunnels so in order to cover all angles you need both.

It has been a bit of learning curve to find this out, when they first had the polytunnels they only used them for rain cover to protect the cherries, not putting the plastic over until after the blossom, then they experimented doing it earlier to encourage an earlier crop but found only the ends of the tunnels were being pollinated as the bees wouldn’t come inside the tunnels as they couldn’t get out.

So now they have found a good compromise by pushing up the sides of the plastic covers this stops the bees getting trapped and still allows a good flow of air keeping the environment as natural as possible.

Then once the blossom has finished the pull the tunnel sides down to warm things up.

Timing changes a fair amount every year but it looks like it will be a fairly normal year with the first really early cherries looking to be ready around the middle of June.

I would love to have bees at my home one day although I understand it is not that easy to look after them so until I can get the experts in to do it for me I’ll try to do my bit by planting as many bee friendly plants as possible.

You could do the same by sowing some bumblebee friendly flower seeds supporting The Bumblebee Conservation Trust.