Sea buckthorn

Value to bees

Nectar

None

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Not a honey source

Which bees, and why

Worked for pollen on warm spring days, and mainly by honey bees and early bumblebee queens. The plant does not need them — the pollen it loses to bees is pollen the wind would otherwise have carried.

The flowers are tiny, apetalous and fully exposed, so nothing is excluded. There is simply very little on offer beyond pollen.

Worth knowing

A genuinely useful early pollen source in a season when protein is scarce, and not a nectar plant at all. Honey sold as sea buckthorn honey is normally a blossom honey from the surrounding flora, or an infusion of berry juice into honey — both legitimate products, neither a monofloral.

Flowering

In flower

March to May (northern hemisphere)

Before or with the emerging leaves, and easily missed — the flowers have no petals to speak of.

When nectar flows

Effectively none. The species is wind-pollinated and the flowers are not built to reward insects.

What it does to the honey

Contributes pollen and, where berry juice is blended in after extraction, a sharp fruit acidity that no nectar could produce.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun on poor, sharply drained, often saline soil. It fixes nitrogen and thrives where almost nothing else will, which is why it colonises dunes.

Size

2-4 m, spreading widely by suckers.

Native range

Coastal and montane Eurasia, from the Atlantic dunes of northwestern Europe through the Baltic and Central Asia to the Himalaya and western China.

Suits

Hedgerow, Large gardens, Farm scale

Maintenance, and the bit that matters

Cutting suckers stimulates more of them. Containment by barrier is more effective than by pruning.

• Male and female plants are separate, and a crop needs both — roughly one male to six or eight females.
• Plant it where the suckering will not matter, or contain it. Removing an established stand is a multi-year job.
• It is one of the few nitrogen-fixing shrubs that tolerates salt spray directly.

What it looks like

Dense, suckering and viciously thorny, with narrow silver-scaled leaves and inconspicuous greenish flowers borne before the leaves on separate male and female plants. The berries are the point — hard, orange and extremely sour.