Durian

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Nectarivorous bats are the principal and most effective pollinators, and this is the clearest case in the catalogue of a flower not designed for bees at all. Bees are opportunists on it — profitable ones, but not the intended partner.

Worth knowing

A short, intense and unreliable flow, worked in the narrow overlap between when the flowers are open and when bees are flying.

Flowering

In flower

February to April (northern hemisphere)

Flowering is triggered by a dry spell rather than by the calendar, and a wet year can produce almost no flowering at all.

When nectar flows

Copious and available for a very short window per flower — the flowers open in the late afternoon and are spent by mid-morning.

Year-to-year variation

Highly erratic. Durian needs a distinct dry period to initiate flowering, and consecutive wet years mean no crop and no honey.

What it does to the honey

Gives a dark, thick and pungent honey with a savoury sulphurous undertone that is unmistakably related to the fruit and divides opinion as sharply.

Growing it

Conditions

Wet tropical lowland, deep soil, high humidity and no frost ever.

Size

25-40 m in forest, kept lower in orchards.

Native range

Borneo and Sumatra, cultivated throughout Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

• Not growable outside the wet tropics, and a very large tree where it is.
• Orchard growers increasingly hand-pollinate because bat populations have declined, which quietly reduces the bee forage too.

What it looks like

A very large forest tree with buttressed trunk and cauliflorous flowering — clusters of large cream flowers borne directly on the trunk and main branches, opening in the late afternoon and falling by the following morning.