Insights

Quinta Das Abelhas is my personal regeneration journey, co-founding a land regeneration project in Central Portugal. In January 2017, we purchased 10 hectares of degraded pine monoculture land near the Serra da Estrela mountains. Our aim is to bring back a mixed forest and create a safe space for pollinators, in particular the honey bees.

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With observation at the start, we made strategic land interventions and witnessed how the transformation of human-abused ecosystems can transform quickly. A big shift occurred when rapidly the pine monoculture died from the nematode disease so we removed, section by section, hectares of dying pine. This allowed the dormant native trees to reawaken and oak, chestnut and alder buckthorn to come through at a much faster rate. The land slowly started to reforest itself alongside our own planting with a huge variety of species from ginkgo to medronho and many fruit and nut trees.

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Land Regeneration and Soil Health

We composted, green-manured, mulched and applied water retention strategies such as swales over the land. Over time there was an increase in the number and diversity of wildflowers, plants and insects. This has led to many more pollinators, bugs, butterflies, worms and bees and the bird life increasing. Highlights have been seeing the hoopoe rearing their young and bats breeding on the land.

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The Honey Bees

Our passion is to find more honey bees living wild in the trees as nature intended. With so many of the old trees cut by humans and replaced by monocultures,  we produced and installed log hives on our land and neighbouring regeneration projects. These bee homes are not for honey production centred but simply for the purpose of supporting bee health by mimicking the nests honey bees have in nature.

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Regenerative Grazing

In 2020, our neighbour's horses came to the land which, over the next two years, was our exploration into regenerative grazing. This opened up the land to new potential, in particular, we have seen the increase of mushroom and bug life, the manure enriching soil and land life.

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Organic Food 
Each year the food and herb growing area has expanded little by little on the land, becoming more local in all our food purchases and from neighbouring producers.