Field maple

Value to bees

Nectar

Very high

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Worked intensively by honey bees in May. As with sycamore, the inconspicuousness of the flowers is exactly why the tree's importance is so widely missed — the sound is usually how people notice.

Small open flowers with fully exposed nectar, accessible to every insect.

Worth knowing

Very high nectar from a tree most people do not realise is flowering, plus a honeydew contribution later in the season.

Flowering

In flower

April to May (northern hemisphere)

Two to three weeks in mid spring, alongside the emerging leaves.

When nectar flows

Copious for so inconspicuous a flower, and warm still weather during the bloom produces an intense flow. Aphid honeydew follows through the summer.

Year-to-year variation

Reliable in flower, and a substantial contributor to spring honey where mature trees are common.

What it does to the honey

Contributes a pale, mild, slightly buttery character to spring multiflorals, and its honeydew adds a darker mineral note later in the year.

Growing it

Conditions

Sun or part shade, any soil including chalk and heavy clay. Tolerant of pollution, wind and hard cutting.

Size

8-20 m, and readily maintained as hedge.

Native range

Europe and western Asia.

Suits

Hedgerow, Large gardens, Small gardens

• An excellent small garden tree and one of the best hedgerow species in Britain — it takes clipping, colours brilliantly in autumn and feeds bees.
• A hedge cut every year flowers very little. Cut on a two- or three-year rotation, or let a few trees grow out of the hedge line.
• Far better suited to small gardens than sycamore, which does a similar job at three times the size.

What it looks like

A small tree with corky ridged twigs and small five-lobed leaves, bearing upright clusters of small yellow-green flowers with the emerging foliage, followed by horizontally-winged seeds.