Bitter aloe

Value to bees

Nectar

Very high

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Major honey crop — yields a surplus in good years

Which bees, and why

Worked by the Cape honey bee, a subspecies with the extraordinary ability to produce female offspring from unfertilised eggs — which allows laying workers to take over a queenless colony, and has made it a serious problem when moved north into African honey bee territory. Sunbirds are the flower's evolved pollinators.

Worth knowing

An excellent winter nectar and pollen source in a landscape with few alternatives at that season.

Flowering

In flower

June to August (southern hemisphere)

A winter flowering, which is genuinely rare and makes it valuable for colony survival.

When nectar flows

Generous. The tubular flowers hold substantial nectar to attract sunbirds.

Year-to-year variation

Reliable where stands are extensive, and valuable disproportionately for its timing.

What it does to the honey

Contributes a pronounced bitterness with a medicinal herbal note over a warm caramel base.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun with sharp drainage and protection from winter wet. It tolerates drought and light frost and rots in cold damp ground.

Size

2-3 m tall, occasionally to 5 m.

Native range

The Eastern Cape and southern KwaZulu-Natal of South Africa, and southern Lesotho, on dry hillsides and grassland.

Suits

Containers and window boxes, Large gardens, Small gardens

• Grown as a container succulent in temperate climates and kept dry over winter.
• Slow-growing and long-lived; a mature flowering plant represents many years.
• Tapping for bitter sap is a regulated wild-harvest industry in South Africa and does not kill the plant.

What it looks like

A single unbranched stem topped with a rosette of thick spiny grey-green leaves, carrying erect candelabra-like spikes of tubular orange-red flowers in winter.