Jujube

Value to bees

Nectar

Very high

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Major honey crop — yields a surplus in good years

Which bees, and why

Worked by managed western honey bees on the Chinese migratory circuit, by the native Apis cerana, and across south Asia by wild Apis dorsata colonies. Jujube is one of the few plants where all three are genuinely in play.

Very small fully open flowers with exposed nectar, accessible to almost any insect including ants and wasps that compete for it.

Worth knowing

A very high nectar source in arid and semi-arid country where the alternatives are few, which makes it structurally important as well as productive.

Flowering

In flower

May to July (northern hemisphere)

Early summer in China, autumn for the related species grown across south Asia and Arabia.

When nectar flows

Copious from a very large number of tiny flowers, and heavily dependent on humidity — jujube secretes poorly in dry air, which is a recurring problem across the northern Chinese plains.

Year-to-year variation

Variable with humidity rather than with rainfall, and a major crop in a good year across Shandong, Hebei and Shanxi.

What it does to the honey

Ziziphus nectar produces dark, warm, dried-fruit-and-caramel honeys with a characteristic bitterness on the finish. The genus is remarkably consistent across species and continents — Yemeni sidr, Pakistani ber and Chinese jujube honeys are recognisably related.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, extreme heat tolerance, drought tolerance, and it copes with poor saline soil. Needs hot summers to fruit well.

Size

5-10 m.

Native range

China and south Asia, cultivated for over four thousand years and naturalised widely.

Suits

Large gardens, Orchard

• Increasingly grown in warm-temperate gardens for the fruit, and it fruits reliably only where summers are genuinely hot.
• Thorny and suckering; site it accordingly.
• Extremely deep-rooted, which is what allows it to flower in country with no surface water at all.

What it looks like

A small spiny tree with glossy oval three-veined leaves, tiny greenish-yellow flowers in the leaf axils, and oval fruit ripening from green through red to a wrinkled dark brown.