Sidr

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

Worked by heat-adapted local subspecies of the western honey bee, kept traditionally in hollow logs and clay cylinders and now increasingly in frame hives. The flowers are tiny and borne in profusion, so a single mature tree carries an enormous number of them.

Very small, fully open flowers with exposed nectar — accessible to almost any insect, including ants, wasps and flies that compete with the bees for it.

Worth knowing

In much of its range sidr is not merely a good forage plant but effectively the only one at that time of year, which makes it structurally critical rather than simply valuable.

Flowering

In flower

October to December (northern hemisphere)

The main autumn flowering, which produces the premium crop. A lighter spring flowering also occurs and yields a honey the trade rates lower.

When nectar flows

Nectar secretion depends on groundwater rather than rainfall, which is what allows the tree to flow in a season with no rain at all. Falling water tables are therefore a direct threat to the crop in a way drought alone is not.

Year-to-year variation

Variable with temperature and water table. Yields per hive are modest by European standards — the economics rest entirely on price.

What it does to the honey

Sidr nectar gives the honey its dried-date and caramel weight and the faint medicinal bitterness on the finish. The unusually low moisture content of the finished honey is partly the plant and largely the climate: in the Hadhramaut, honey ripens in air far drier than any European hive ever sees.

Growing it

Conditions

Extreme heat, full sun, drought and saline or poor soils. It has no cold tolerance to speak of and is not a temperate garden plant.

Size

4-12 m, with a broad spreading crown and a very deep taproot.

Native range

The Arabian peninsula, the Levant, the Sahel and North Africa, extending into south Asia. Closely related Ziziphus species occupy the same niche across India and Pakistan.

• Widely planted for shade, fodder, fuel and soil stabilisation across the Sahel and Arabia; the honey is one return among several rather than the reason for planting.
• Deep-rooted enough to survive where irrigation is impossible, which is exactly why it matters in the landscapes it occupies.

What it looks like

A spreading evergreen or semi-evergreen tree with small oval three-veined leaves, paired thorns at the leaf nodes — one straight, one hooked — tiny greenish-yellow flowers in dense clusters, and small round yellow-brown fruit.