Coconut palm

Value to bees

Nectar

Moderate

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Fully exposed nectaries on an open inflorescence, so nothing is excluded — stingless bees, dwarf honey bees, wasps and flies work it alongside managed colonies.

Worth knowing

The most reliable background forage across much of the coastal tropics, precisely because it never stops. Coastal apiaries frequently rest on it between the seasonal flows.

Flowering

In flower

January to December (northern hemisphere)

A mature palm produces a new inflorescence roughly every month, so it is in flower continuously. The year-round window is literal.

When nectar flows

Modest per inflorescence and continuous in aggregate. Coconut is a maintenance flow rather than a surplus one in most places, and a genuine crop where plantations are dense.

What it does to the honey

Gives a light, clean, mildly sweet honey with a faint waxy and vaguely nutty character rather than anything recognisably of coconut.

Growing it

Conditions

Warm tropical coastal conditions, sandy soil, high humidity and salt tolerance.

Size

20-30 m.

Native range

Uncertain in detail — probably the Indo-Pacific — and now pantropical along essentially every warm coastline.

• Not growable outside the tropics.
• Coconut sugar and coconut nectar sold as sweeteners come from tapping the cut inflorescence, which is a completely different product from honey and involves no bees.

What it looks like

A single slender curved trunk topped by a crown of long pinnate fronds, with branched inflorescences emerging from the leaf axils carrying many small cream male flowers and a few large female ones.