Also, seventeen villagers is a far larger population than your food can support long enough to get the second faction, unfortunately; every hour will leave you with, on average, a deficit of nearly 400 food, and the three trees, plus the hive, only provide you with 3500.

I suggest pausing when you're away, and mushroom-hunting like a madwoman when you're there. If you've got the master farmers, rain-dance; more mushrooms appear in the rain. You will make extremely slow progress this way, but your food will shoot up in relatively few Isola years.