Eucalyptus

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 honey bees at scale, and in Australia by an enormous native fauna — stingless bees, native solitary bees, birds, flying-foxes and possums. The introduced honey bee's competition with those native pollinators for eucalypt nectar is an active conservation argument in Australia and not a settled one.

Nectar sits in an open cup at the base of the stamen mass and is freely accessible to short-tongued insects, birds and mammals alike.

Worth knowing

Prolific in both nectar and pollen when flowering, though the pollen of some species is nutritionally poor for honey bees, and colonies confined to a single eucalypt species can suffer over time despite abundant forage.

Flowering

In flower

January to December (both hemispheres)

Genuinely year-round as a genus: individual species flower in defined windows, but across a region there is usually something in bloom. Many species also flower on multi-year cycles rather than annually — jarrah heavily only about every second year.

When nectar flows

Eucalypt nectar flows are famously heavy and famously irregular. Bud development in many species begins a year or more before flowering, so a beekeeper can forecast a flow well in advance and still lose it to heat or drought.

Year-to-year variation

Enormous between species and between years. A good eucalypt flow is among the largest honey crops on earth; a failed one leaves colonies needing feeding.

What it does to the honey

Eucalypt nectar carries the genus's characteristic resinous, camphoraceous and caramel notes, but the range across species is wider than for any other honey genus: jarrah is dark, malty and barely crystallises, yellow box is pale and delicate, red gum sits somewhere between. Treating them as one flavour is the commonest error in reading a eucalyptus honey label.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun and free drainage. Hardiness varies enormously by species; a few (Eucalyptus gunnii, E. pauciflora) survive British winters, most do not.

Size

From mallee shrubs of 2-3 m to mountain ash over 90 m.

Native range

Australia, with a handful of species in New Guinea, Indonesia and the Philippines. Planted worldwide for timber, pulp and oil.

Suits

Large gardens

• Fast-growing and generally far larger than a garden expects. Many species are also shallow-rooted and prone to shedding limbs.
• Where planted outside Australia as a plantation crop, eucalypts are frequently criticised for water use and for supporting little native wildlife — a bee-forage benefit does not settle that argument.

What it looks like

Evergreen trees with aromatic leaves, characteristically shedding bark, and flowers made up of a mass of stamens rather than petals — the bud cap, or operculum, pops off to release them. Flower colour runs white, cream, yellow, pink and red depending on species.