Yellow Sweet Clover

Wife is getting some Honey Bee Hives and I'm going to plant something for the Bees including Yellow Sweet Clover.Does anyone here grow Yellow Sweet Clover?Do you plant it with a cover crop or alone in the Spring?

If its like Sweet Red Clover? No cover crop needed. Plant it like broadcasted hay. Spread it, & harrow it in.

Yellow blossom sweet clover makes wonderful sweet smelling hay but it has to be dry. When I was a kid we used to grow it all the time and put it in with a McKee harvestor . You could smell it before you got to the barn. The cattle loved it. I still like to include a percentage of if in my grasseed today.

I don't know where "here" is. In central New York, where I live, you can "frost seed" clover of many varieties. Yes, it sounds nuts. I have watched my father do it with snow still on the ground and results could not have been better.

All this being said, medium red clover is one of the very best nectar producers you can grow. However, honeybees do not like clover, especially medium red clover. As the bees harvest the pollen and nectar the pistil (or stamen, I cannot remember which) gets "tripped" by the honeybee's activity. As this occurs the honeybee gets knocked right off the med red clover blossom. Second cutting med red is more delicate than first and thus less objectionable to the bees. "Dutch" clover, or white I think is also alsike clover is a much smaller and better forage for the bees. HTH. best Yeoman

Traditional farmer, I have hives, we seed dutch white, alsike, ladino, and yellow sweet. Here it takes 2 wears to get yellow sweet to come up to full potential. With dutch white, you can mow part of it 1 day and it will reflower in the next day or 2 giving you an almost continual source of nectar all summer. Any of these will make great honey. I purposely leave 2 or 3 acres of ground idle and seed buckwheat around the 2nd or 3rd week of July here in central Iowa. That allows me to take the good light honey off the hives in mid august and gives the bees enough flowering plants to make their winter feed supply. Buckwheat honey is dark and tastes nasty. Someone else is telling you about red clover. Around here the blossoms of the red clover are too large for honeybees to get to the nectar. I think he has red clover and alfalfa blossoms mixed up. It is the alfalfa that has the snapper in the center of the flower that the bees don't like, once snapped they will remember it and avoid the crop. I don't know how many hives she is planning to get, she will need at least 2 to start out. Look for a local beekeeper, 99.9 % of them will be glad to help her. Don't be afraid to ask for advice, if she hasn't done it, find someone who teaches beekeeping and take the class. My wife is at the local library tonight teaching 1. Good Luck.

She has taken a Honey Bee class and joined the local Bee Keepers Assoc.and has a 'mentor' to help her.We're now putting two hives together and the Bees are coming in April.I already have a good stand of Crimson Clover I planted last Fall and its started to come out supposedly thats good too.I garden a lot and no one around my farm uses very many if any chemicals and I don't use use any so hopefully that'll help too.Glad you told me about the Buckwheat as I was going to plant some of that too so I'll wait until later in the Summer to do that.