Finally got around to planting one of the three fruit trees that I bought. I wanted to put them in the sunny zone near the vegetables, and admitted I was ignoring the fact they would grow up to shade the garden. So why create my own problems?

I decided to put the peach tree near the driveway, in a clearing. There was some kind of tall bush which I cut down, and since the rabbits had moved out of the clearing, it was safe to plant. I chose the spot where the rabbits had nested for the site of the tree, thinking, “This is a place of life. It will be good for the tree.”

I started to dig and as I was digging, bees began to come by and check out what I was doing. “Interesting,” I thought, “why are they curious? is there pollen in the ground?”

Turns out I was digging into a ground beehive.

By the time I had discovered bee chambers in the ground, I had already dug the hole needed for the tree. It seems that I had only disturbed the outer edges of the hive; bees were flying in and out of the mulch at the bush nearby, so only a small amount of damage.

Taking the tree nursery’s advice, I dug what I thought was a wide hole, hacked away at the roots with a shovel to stimulate growth, and put the tree in, using a mix of the native soil plus a little bit of compost on top.

June 6 update: There was a storm last night and the sapling fell over. I reinforced it with some heavy logs so that it wouldn’t fall over again. Now I understand why I see new trees in the city tied to stakes on either side.

Peach sapling, meet ground bees by mehron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International