Strawberry tree

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 hard by honey bees and late bumblebees on any mild autumn day. The flowers hang downwards and are narrow-mouthed, so a bee has to work at them — bumblebees handle the shape better than honey bees do.

Pendulous urn-shaped flowers with a constricted mouth, which favours bees that can grip and hang. Some short-tongued bees rob the nectar through the base instead.

Worth knowing

Valuable out of all proportion to its abundance, because of when it flowers. Late nectar lets colonies enter winter with fresh stores in a landscape that has otherwise shut down.

Flowering

In flower

October to December (northern hemisphere)

The latest significant nectar flow in the European year, running past ivy and into early winter in mild coastal areas.

When nectar flows

Needs mild, still autumn weather to yield. In a cold or wet November the flowers open and the bees cannot work them, which is why corbezzolo honey fails entirely in some years.

Year-to-year variation

Notoriously unreliable. Sardinian producers regard a genuine corbezzolo crop as a two-or-three-years-in-five event, which is a substantial part of why the honey is so expensive.

What it does to the honey

Arbutus nectar carries the phenolic compounds responsible for corbezzolo honey's extreme bitterness — coffee grounds, burnt caramel, an almost smoky finish. It is the most extreme example on the site of a honey being valued for the absence of sweetness.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun to light shade, well-drained soil, and unusually for the heather family it tolerates lime. Hardy to about -10 °C and happy in coastal exposure.

Size

3-8 m, occasionally to 12 m.

Native range

The Mediterranean basin and the Atlantic fringe of western Europe, with a notable and long-isolated native population in southwest Ireland.

Suits

Small gardens, Large gardens, Containers and window boxes

• One of the best autumn-flowering plants a temperate garden can have, and one of very few evergreen trees offering serious late forage.
• The fruit is edible and largely tasteless — unedo is usually glossed as 'I eat one', meaning once. It is used for jam and for the Portuguese spirit medronho.
• Slow to establish and worth buying as a reasonable-sized plant; a small one takes years to reach flowering size.

What it looks like

A dense evergreen shrub or small tree with dark glossy leaves, shredding red-brown bark, drooping clusters of small white or pink urn-shaped flowers, and warty red-orange fruit ripening a full year behind the flowers it came from.