Quillay

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Worked steadily through the flowering. Central Chile's native bee fauna is rich and poorly documented, and competition with introduced honey bees has had far less study here than the equivalent question in Australia or New Zealand.

Small open flowers with exposed nectar — accessible to short-tongued bees.

Worth knowing

A good summer nectar source in dry country, and one of relatively few substantial ones in central Chile.

Flowering

In flower

November to January (southern hemisphere)

Southern-hemisphere late spring and summer, in a landscape with a short season.

When nectar flows

Steady nectar over several weeks from clusters of small open flowers.

Year-to-year variation

Dependable in the central Chilean summer, and one of the region's two defining monofloral crops alongside ulmo.

What it does to the honey

Quillay nectar produces an amber honey with dried-fruit and resinous notes and a faint clean bitterness that stops it being merely sweet.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, drought tolerance, poor drained soil. Frost-hardy only to a few degrees below zero.

Size

10-20 m.

Native range

Central Chile, in the dry matorral shrubland of the coastal ranges and Andean foothills.

Suits

Large gardens

• Rarely grown outside Chile except as a curiosity in Mediterranean-climate gardens.
• Bark harvesting for saponins is now largely from managed plantations rather than wild stands, after decades of unsustainable extraction from natural matorral.

What it looks like

An evergreen tree with thick leathery glossy leaves and clusters of small greenish-white star-shaped flowers, followed by distinctive five-lobed star-shaped seed capsules.