Moringa

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

The flower is bilaterally symmetrical with a fairly open throat, and carpenter bees are the most effective pollinators across much of its range while honey bees take the larger share of the nectar.

Worth knowing

A dependable year-round trickle rather than a flow, which in a dryland landscape is worth more than its volume suggests.

Flowering

In flower

January to December (northern hemisphere)

Flowers more or less continuously in warm frost-free climates, with peaks after rain. The window is recorded as year-round because that is what it does.

When nectar flows

Modest per flower and valuable in aggregate, because something is almost always open. Peaks follow rainfall rather than a calendar.

What it does to the honey

Gives a pale amber honey with a green, faintly vegetal and peppery character that reflects the mustard-oil glycosides running through the whole plant.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, heat and sharp drainage. Extremely drought-tolerant and killed by frost.

Size

5-12 m, reaching several metres in its first year.

Native range

The sub-Himalayan foothills of northwestern India. Now cultivated throughout the dry tropics and subtropics worldwide.

Suits

Large gardens, Farm scale

• Grows from seed or cutting at remarkable speed, which is why it is planted for leaf crops on a coppice cycle.
• Coppicing for leaves removes the flowering. A tree kept for bees has to be allowed to grow up.

What it looks like

An open, rather untidy tree with pale corky bark, feathery tripinnate leaves and loose panicles of creamy fragrant flowers, followed by the long ribbed pods that give it its English name.