Alder forest pollen plant

Alder photo as a honey plant

Alder, Latin name Alnus Mill., often grows in our forests. In the spring, when the alder tree is in bloom, it is often visited by bees. Therefore, in the article we will consider such questions as whether honey can be made from alder, whether alder is a good honey plant, whether bees collect alder pollen and how good alder is as a pollen plant, what is the value of alder for bees and much more. Read to the end it will be interesting!

Content

• Description of the pollen-bearing alder plant
• Black alder description
• Gray alder description
• Alder shrub pollen bearer
• Alder as a honey plant
• The value of alder for bees

 

Description of the pollen-bearing alder plant

Alder belongs to the birch family (Betulaceae). There are several types of alder - gray (A. incana (L.) Moench), which is found everywhere, and black (A. glutinosa (L.) Gaertn.), which is rarer. Green alder (A. viridis) is rare. Alder grows throughout Europe up to the Caucasus, and can be found in Siberia and North Africa. Alder is no less valuable plant for beekeeping than hazel, aspen, birch, poplar, pine, fir, spruce.

Black alder description

Alder is sticky or black. A fast-growing deciduous tree, reaching 20-35 meters in height, with dark brown bark. Young branches are reddish-brown, with whitish transverse lentils, sometimes slightly pubescent, smooth, often sticky. The leaves are round or obovate with a notch at the apex. Young leaves are sticky, shiny, glabrous or hairy. Adults are glabrous, dark green above, light green below with prominent veins and pubescent petioles. Alder blooms for the first time at 12-15 years of age and lives to be 100-120 years old. The flowers are monoecious, the anther catkins are drooping, collected in a raceme of 3-5; pistillate - 3-5. The fruits are nuts with a leathery, narrow wing. When the fruits ripen, the bracts become woody, forming a kind of cone up to 2 cm long.

Black alder grows in depressions, swamps and peat bogs; along rivers and streams, sometimes forming alder forests, which are called alder forests, and which serve as a sign of the close occurrence of groundwater. Gray alder grows in drier areas.
Black alder can reach 2.5 m in height, while gray and green alder form tall shrubs rather than trees. Alder has great frost resistance, but suffers from drought more often than other trees (especially black alder). All types of alder prefer to grow in acidic soils.

Gray alder description

Alder is gray or white. Monoecious tree 5-15 meters in height with smooth gray bark. Young branches are fluffy, not sticky. The leaves are ovate, serrate, pointed at the apex. Young are densely fluffy, not sticky, later dark green above, gray-green pubescent below. The inflorescence is like that of a sticky alder, the cones are usually up to 1.5 cm, the nut has clear membranous wings. It grows along the banks of rivers and lakes, in rich, moist soils.

Alder shrub pollen bearer

Alder shrub is a shrub 1-3 m high, in the tundra it is low, creeping, in the southern regions of its distribution (southern zone of Siberia, the south of the Far East) it is a tree up to 6 m high. In the subalpine zone it forms monodominant continuous thickets. In the forest belt it grows in the form of individual bushes or clumps.

Shrub alder is valuable for green construction in the northern regions as a very unpretentious, beautiful plant that retains green foliage for a long time in the fall. Suitable for hedges, borders, edges, strengthening slopes, banks of reservoirs.
Alder as a honey plant

 

How valuable is alder for beekeeping?

What honey is made from alder? First you need to find out whether bees take honey from alder or whether bees collect alder pollen?

Black alder and gray alder bloom in early spring, in April - early May, and, weather permitting, bees are very willing to visit its flowers. But whether bees take honey from alder trees, bees actually collect pollen from alder flowers. In addition, bees visit alder to collect glue from which bees produce propolis.

So, when asked whether bees collect alder pollen, we can confidently say yes, alder is a pollen-bearer, and a good one at that.

Shrub alder provides only pollen to bees, but is visited by bees quite actively. The anthers open in the first ten days of June and collect dust until the end of the month. In different bee colonies, the proportion of pollen pollen from shrub alder can vary from 2 to 17%.

But to the question whether bees take honey from alder and to what extent alder is a honey plant, one can answer that alder is not a honey plant and bees do not collect honey from alder; pollination of alder is carried out by the wind.

Thus, we can summarize that alder is a valuable plant for beekeeping as a pollen carrier and as a plant from which bees collect propolis.

The value of alder for bees

The great value of alder for bees is that alder blooms in late February - early March almost simultaneously with hazel and therefore is one of the earliest spring sources of pollen for bees. Bees from the alder tree carry greenish-yellow color with a coffee tint, forming medium-sized stalks,
Despite the low protein content in alder pollen, in early spring pollen collected by bees from different alder species can play a large role in the development of bee colonies. Alder pollen contains 23.55% fats, 22.44% proteins, 4.6% sugars, various enzymes: diastase, catalase and invertase, as well as a number of vitamins.

Some beekeepers feed bee colonies with pre-collected and dried alder pollen. To do this, alder pollen is mixed with honey in a 1:1 ratio and water is added in the amount of 0.5 liters of water per 1 kg of mixture. The resulting mixture is rubbed into the honeycombs and placed in the hives next to the brood; this feeding contributes to the early spring growth of colony strength.