Since it was a brand new world, I was able to closely watch the growth rate of crops. Before I built a beehive, I observed that flax and hemp seemed to have nearly identical growth rates. After building a beehive, the next round of flax was fully mature many hours before even one hemp plant reached maturity.
Maybe flax already had a significantly faster growth rate than hemp, and my initial observation that they seemed about the same without a beehive was incorrect, but I was wondering what other people thought.