Tiaca

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Small open flowers with fully accessible nectar, worked by introduced honey bees and by the native Patagonian bumblebee, whose decline in the face of introduced commercial bumblebees is one of the better-documented cases of its kind.

Worth knowing

The second half of the Chilean native-forest season, extending the crop by several weeks after ulmo finishes.

Flowering

In flower

January to March (southern hemisphere)

Late summer in the southern hemisphere, immediately following the ulmo flow.

When nectar flows

Free and abundant across large panicles, and reliable in the high rainfall of the Valdivian forest.

What it does to the honey

Gives a light amber honey with a soft floral sweetness, gentler and less aromatic than ulmo from the same forest.

Growing it

Conditions

Cool wet temperate conditions on permanently moist acid soil.

Size

10-20 m.

Native range

The temperate rainforest of southern Chile and adjacent Argentina, on wet ground and river margins.

• Occasionally grown in very mild wet temperate gardens and rare outside Chile.
• It is a forest tree of a threatened forest type, and its honey is an argument for keeping the forest.

What it looks like

A slender evergreen with narrow toothed leaves in opposite pairs and broad terminal panicles of many small cream flowers.