Nectar flow

Definition

A flow is what turns bee forage into honey. It needs abundance, generosity, synchrony and the right timing — a plant that trickles feeds a colony while a plant that floods fills a super. Flows are named for their source, and a beekeeper's season is organised around the two or three that a landscape actually delivers.

Honey records that discuss this

• Cashew honeyTangy and resinous with a warm caramel base and a faintly astringent finish — assertive and quite unlike the mild nut it comes from.

Plant records that discuss this

• HawthornThe backbone of the temperate hedgerow and one of the great mass-flowering events of the European year. A hawthorn hedge in full bloom in May carries an extraordinary density of insects — bees, hoverflies, beetles and flies together — and the plant supports several hundred invertebrate species beyond the ones visiting the flowers. Its nectar flow is heavy, brief and famously unreliable from year to year.
• SidrIn much of its range sidr is not merely a good forage plant but effectively the only one at that time of year, which makes it structurally critical rather than simply valuable.
• BuckwheatGenuinely useful as a late-summer gap filler, and its speed from sowing to flower makes it one of the few forage plants that can be deployed tactically within a single season.
• MesquiteA principal desert forage plant, providing both nectar and pollen in landscapes with very few alternatives.
• Black sageAn outstanding nectar source in a good year, and the backbone of the chaparral forage sequence.
• Japanese pagoda treeA good late nectar source and moderate pollen, at a genuinely useful point in the season.
• CashewA good dry-season nectar and pollen source across the tropics.
• Tree of heavenA heavy urban and post-industrial nectar source, and an uncomfortable one: the same qualities that make it valuable to bees make it a landscape problem.
• StringybarkOne of the mainstays of Australian commercial honey production, valued for both a heavy nectar flow and good pollen.