Mangium

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Major honey crop — yields a surplus in good years

Which bees, and why

Extrafloral nectaries evolved to recruit ants as bodyguards against herbivores, not to attract pollinators. Bees are exploiting a defence system rather than a reward, and there is no pollination relationship in it at all.

Worth knowing

A substantial plantation flow across Southeast Asia, produced by a mechanism most beekeeping literature does not cover — extrafloral nectar, secreted by the leaf rather than the flower.

Flowering

In flower

February to May (southern hemisphere)

Flowering is brief; the extrafloral nectaries that produce the honey are active for much longer, which decouples the honey flow from the bloom.

When nectar flows

Mostly extrafloral. The glands on the phyllodes secrete for months and are what bees actually work, which is why a mangium honey crop does not coincide neatly with the tree flowering.

What it does to the honey

Gives a dark amber honey with malt, molasses and a mild resinous edge — much closer to a honeydew in character than to a floral honey, which follows from where the sugar came from.

Growing it

Conditions

Wet tropical lowland on acid, often degraded soil, where it grows exceptionally fast.

Size

15-30 m, and very fast.

Native range

Northeastern Queensland, Papua New Guinea and the Moluccas. Planted at enormous scale in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Suits

Farm scale

• Planted for pulpwood on short rotations, with honey as an unplanned by-product.
• Its invasiveness outside plantations is a genuine problem and not offset by the honey.

What it looks like

A fast-growing evergreen with large flattened leaf-like phyllodes rather than true leaves, and slender cream flower spikes. Small nectar glands sit at the base of each phyllode.