Southern beech

Value to bees

Nectar

None

Pollen

Low

As a honey crop

Major honey crop — yields a surplus in good years

Which bees, and why

Honey bees collect the droplets directly from the scale insects' waxy filaments. Bellbirds, tui and kaka depend heavily on the same resource, and introduced German and common wasps consume a very large share of it — one of New Zealand's most serious invertebrate conservation problems.

Worth knowing

No floral nectar and negligible pollen. The honeydew is the whole of its value, and it is enormous — which is exactly why nectar and pollen are rated separately in this catalogue.

Flowering

In flower

January to April (southern hemisphere)

This is the honeydew season rather than a flowering window. The trees themselves are wind-pollinated and offer no nectar at all.

When nectar flows

None from the flowers, which are wind-pollinated. The entire resource is honeydew excreted by Ultracoelostoma scale insects feeding on the bark.

Year-to-year variation

Depends on scale insect populations, and increasingly on how much of the honeydew introduced wasps take before the bees reach it.

What it does to the honey

Contributes a malty, resinous, distinctly savoury character with low sweetness and a mineral finish.

Growing it

Conditions

Cool moist temperate conditions on acid soil. Slow-growing and long-lived.

Size

15-30 m tall in good forest.

Native range

New Zealand. Related southern beeches occur in Chile, Argentina, Australia and New Guinea, in a distribution that maps the breakup of Gondwana.

Suits

Large gardens

• A forest tree, and slow to establish.
• Not suited to hot dry conditions.
• The honeydew system requires the scale insects as well as the trees, and it does not transfer to planted specimens.

What it looks like

Tall evergreen trees with small dark leathery leaves and dark furrowed trunks, frequently glistening with honeydew droplets suspended on fine white threads from scale insects in the bark.