Sycamore

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 intensively by honey bees, and the sound of a sycamore in flower is one of the loudest things in a spring wood. The inconspicuousness of the flowers is exactly why the tree's importance is so widely missed.

Small open flowers with exposed nectar — accessible to short-tongued bees and to flies.

Worth knowing

Very high nectar and good pollen, delivered at tree scale in mid-spring, plus a honeydew contribution later. A single mature sycamore is a serious forage asset.

Flowering

In flower

April to May (northern hemisphere)

Two to three weeks, and it can produce an enormous flow in a warm spring — one of the few tree flows capable of filling supers before the oilseed rape has finished.

When nectar flows

Copious and weather-sensitive. Sycamore also hosts very large aphid populations through the summer, and the honeydew they produce is collected by bees as a distinct second resource — the sticky film on cars parked under one is the same substance.

Year-to-year variation

Highly variable between years and heavily dependent on warm still weather during the bloom. In a good year it is one of the biggest flows available.

What it does to the honey

Sycamore contributes a pale to medium amber, mild honey with a slightly buttery character to spring multiflorals, and its honeydew adds a darker, more mineral note later in the year.

Growing it

Conditions

Any soil, sun or shade, and exceptional tolerance of wind, salt and pollution — which is why it was planted so widely in exposed and industrial places.

Size

20-35 m.

Native range

Central and southern Europe and western Asia; introduced to Britain and widely naturalised.

Suits

Large gardens, Hedgerow

• Too large for most gardens and it self-seeds prolifically, which is the source of its bad reputation.
• Where one already exists, it is worth more to bees than almost anything that could replace it. The instinct to remove a sycamore is often a mistake in forage terms.
• Its aphid load is not a disease and does not need treating; it is a second forage resource.

What it looks like

A large domed tree with flaking grey-pink bark and five-lobed leaves, bearing pendulous racemes of small yellow-green flowers, followed by the familiar paired winged seeds.