Raspberry

Value to bees

Nectar

Very high

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Major honey crop — yields a surplus in good years

Which bees, and why

Worked continuously and by everything. The genuinely two-way part is the fruit: a raspberry is an aggregate of drupelets, each needing its own pollination, so incomplete visitation produces the crumbly misshapen fruit every grower recognises. More bees means measurably better raspberries.

Open nodding flowers with fully exposed nectar and stamens — accessible to short-tongued and long-tongued bees alike.

Worth knowing

One of the highest-yielding nectar plants in temperate horticulture, and good for pollen too. Very few plants combine this productivity with this reliability.

Flowering

In flower

May to August (northern hemisphere)

Summer-fruiting varieties flower in late May and June; autumn-fruiting varieties flower from July into September, so growing both extends the forage substantially.

When nectar flows

Exceptionally productive and unusually tolerant of dull cool weather — raspberry keeps secreting on days when lime and clover shut down, which is a large part of its value in northern climates.

Year-to-year variation

Highly dependable. A genuine honey crop where wild raspberry colonises forest clearings at scale, as it does across Poland, the Baltics and Russia.

What it does to the honey

Raspberry nectar produces a pale, delicate honey with a genuine soft berry note and a bright acidity — one of relatively few honeys where a taster names the right fruit unprompted.

Growing it

Conditions

Sun to light shade, moist but well-drained slightly acid soil. It dislikes chalk and waterlogging equally.

Size

1.5-2.5 m, spreading by sucker.

Native range

Europe and northern Asia; closely related species across North America.

Suits

Small gardens, Large gardens, Orchard, Hedgerow, Farm scale

• Grow both a summer-fruiting and an autumn-fruiting variety. It extends the flowering from May to September and gives you fruit twice.
• Autumn-fruiting varieties are simpler: cut every cane to the ground in February and they fruit on the new growth.
• The old canes, cut and left in a stack or standing at 40 cm, are excellent nesting habitat for hollow-stem bees. Do not shred them all.
• Suckers spread. Plant where that is acceptable, or contain the row.

What it looks like

A thicket-forming shrub with biennial canes, pinnate leaves that are white-felted beneath, and small nodding five-petalled white flowers with a prominent boss of stamens, followed by the fruit.