Wilga

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Tiny open flowers with accessible nectar, worked by honey bees in large numbers and by a range of native bees and flies.

Worth knowing

A dependable inland source when the rains have come, and one of the few trees that gives the western New South Wales apiaries anything at all in winter.

Flowering

In flower

June to October (southern hemisphere)

Winter and spring flowering, and strongly rainfall-dependent rather than calendar-driven.

When nectar flows

Modest per flower and produced in quantity, and it flows in country where very little else does.

Year-to-year variation

Entirely rain-dependent. In drought the tree survives and does not flower, which is exactly when a flow would be most valuable.

What it does to the honey

Gives a mid amber honey with a warm, slightly spicy character and a clean finish, without the medicinal edge the eucalypt honeys carry.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, extreme drought tolerance, on heavy or loamy soils in hot dry country.

Size

4-9 m.

Native range

Inland eastern Australia — western New South Wales, Queensland and northern Victoria — on heavier soils in semi-arid woodland.

Suits

Large gardens, Farm scale

• Cut as emergency stock fodder in drought, which limits how much flowers in the years it matters most.
• A useful shade and shelter tree in hot inland gardens.

What it looks like

A dense weeping small tree with narrow aromatic leaves and clusters of very small cream flowers borne freely after rain.