Lychee

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

The flowers are tiny, apetalous and carried in enormous numbers with fully exposed nectaries, so nothing is excluded — honey bees, stingless bees, flies and wasps work them together. Growers across Asia and Madagascar place hives deliberately for fruit set.

Worth knowing

One of the most valuable subtropical orchard flows there is, and a crop whose yield rises measurably where colonies are present.

Flowering

In flower

February to April (northern hemisphere)

Flowering requires a cool dry period to initiate, which is why lychee fruits poorly in the wet tropics and reliably at the subtropical margins. Madagascan and southern-hemisphere crops flower on the opposite half of the year.

When nectar flows

Free and heavy for a short window, and a mature orchard in flower is a substantial commercial flow rather than a trickle.

Year-to-year variation

Notoriously erratic. Lychee needs a cool dry spell to flower at all, and a warm wet winter removes both the fruit crop and the honey.

What it does to the honey

Contributes an unmistakable muscat-grape and rose aroma that survives into the honey more completely than most blossom character does — one of the few genuine cases of a honey echoing its fruit.

Growing it

Conditions

Subtropical warmth with a cool dry winter to trigger flowering, on deep acid soil with reliable moisture in the growing season.

Size

10-15 m, kept lower in orchards.

Native range

Southern China. Cultivated across Southeast Asia, India, Madagascar, South Africa, Australia and Florida.

Suits

Orchard, Large gardens

• Will not fruit in the wet tropics or in a cool temperate climate — it needs the specific combination of subtropical heat and a dry cool spell.
• Slow from seed and normally propagated by air layering, which is why orchard trees fruit within a few years.

What it looks like

A dense round-headed evergreen with glossy pinnate leaves, bronze when young, and large terminal panicles of many tiny greenish-yellow apetalous flowers followed by the familiar red knobbly fruit.