Chañar

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

The pea flower requires a visitor with enough weight to trip the keel, which suits honey bees and carpenter bees and excludes the very smallest visitors.

Worth knowing

A short, heavy and locally important spring flow across the Argentine dry interior.

Flowering

In flower

September to November (southern hemisphere)

Spring flowering, brief and heavy, ahead of the summer heat.

When nectar flows

Concentrated into two or three weeks and generous while it lasts.

Year-to-year variation

Highly dependent on winter rainfall in a semi-arid landscape. Dry years give little.

What it does to the honey

Gives an amber honey with a warm caramel body and a distinct sweet resinous note, related to the sweet syrup traditionally boiled from its pods.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, drought and salinity tolerance, on poor sandy or saline soil.

Size

3-10 m.

Native range

The dry interior of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay, especially the monte and chaco scrub.

Suits

Farm scale

• The pods are boiled into arrope de chañar, a traditional Argentine syrup — a different sweetener from the honey and made from the fruit rather than the flower.
• Not a garden tree outside dry subtropical regions.

What it looks like

A small spiny tree whose smooth green-brown bark peels in papery sheets to reveal bright green beneath, with fine pinnate leaves and dense clusters of small yellow-orange pea flowers.