Carob

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Worked steadily through the autumn, alongside flies and beetles attracted by the scent. Carob is dioecious, so a grove needs male trees for pollination and it is those that supply most of the nectar.

Small open flowers with exposed nectar, accessible to short-tongued insects of every kind.

Worth knowing

Structurally important rather than abundant — a good nectar source at a time of year when a Mediterranean colony has almost no alternatives.

Flowering

In flower

September to November (northern hemisphere)

An autumn flowering, which is what makes it valuable — carob offers nectar when the Mediterranean has otherwise shut down for the year.

When nectar flows

Generous nectar with a strong and frankly disagreeable scent, which is a genuine pollination strategy aimed at flies as much as at bees. Male trees carry the smell and much of the nectar.

Year-to-year variation

Dependable where carob is grown at orchard scale, and increasingly scarce as traditional carob groves have been abandoned or cleared.

What it does to the honey

Carob nectar produces a very dark, savoury, malty honey with a fermented, almost cheesy note. It is one of the clearest cases in the catalogue of an unpleasant-smelling flower producing an interesting honey.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, drought-tolerant, tolerant of poor and saline soils. Frost-tender and unsuited to anywhere with a real winter.

Size

8-15 m, with a broad spreading crown.

Native range

The eastern Mediterranean, cultivated around the whole basin since antiquity.

Suits

Large gardens, Orchard

• A genuinely useful drought-tolerant tree for Mediterranean and dry subtropical gardens, and a serious autumn forage plant.
• Plant a male tree if pods are wanted — and be aware that the male flowers are the ones that smell.
• Long-lived and slow-growing, with trees of several centuries not uncommon in old groves.

What it looks like

A broad evergreen tree with dark glossy pinnate leaves and small greenish-red flowers borne directly on the older wood in short spikes, followed by long leathery brown pods.