Gardening – Plants for honeybees (Part 1)

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at the wonderful Big Buzz Festival at Matakana School. The topic was plants for honeybees and the myriad other pollinators that are so important. In my opinion, this is one of the most vital areas that farmers and gardeners can contribute to the wellbeing of our planet. It is a large topic, so I’ll split it over two editions, first covering natives, then introduced species.

Although I’m not a beekeeper, I’ve had a long association with bees. From my early years in the kiwifruit industry nearly 40 years ago, I came to realise just how important bees were to crop pollination. The irony of introducing hives to kiwifruit is that their flowers are not well suited to bees – providing a good quality pollen, but little nectar at a time of year bees really need nectar. As a white, night-scented flower, I’ve theorised that the natural pollinator for kiwifruit is most likely moths rather than bees.

During my years at Massey studying horticulture, I worked the holidays as a beekeeper for my older brother, who now heads one of the largest manuka honey operations in the country. We’d drive trucks through hunting tracks at night to shift hives. We would take them from the Kaimai ranges, where the bees had been feasting on rewarewa, to kiwifruit orchards for the pollination season, then on to farms in the Waikato and King Country for the summer thistle and clover season.

In the right season, rewarewa is one of the most prolific nectar producers of the New Zealand natives – in fact, so prolific that early settlers called it the NZ honeysuckle. In our best sites, we would have hives carrying up to eight full supers in a good season. Rewarewa is also an ideal tree for regeneration on poor soils, forming stands of slender, attractive trees that provide a nursery for the slower growers, along with manuka, kanuka, makomako (wineberry) and cordyline, all of which are also good nectar producers.

Pohutukawa produces a fine honey in good quantity, although it is often mixed with other species as the stands are generally small. A notable exception is pohutukawa honey from Motiti Island in the Bay of Plenty, which incidentally is also the origin of the yellow-flowered Pohutukawa. Its relatives the rata are also good nectar producers, but are much rarer and therefore not usually significant.

While most natives are spring or summer flowering, there is a particularly useful group that flower in autumn and winter to early spring. These are rangiora (also known as bushman’s friend), houhere (also known as lacebark), which makes a lovely hedge or specimen plant, and pseudopanax (or five finger), which is also an attractive large shrub.

Puriri is another that flowers in winter, these grow so huge that most home gardens are too small for this giant. Other relatively big native trees suitable for larger properties are tawa and hinau (the berries of both species are very important for kereru and kaka) and moisture-loving tawari – like rewarewa these tend to mass flower, making them excellent for honey production.

For any size property, a hedge of natives provides habitat for birds and both nectar and pollen for insects. Corokia, akeake, horopito, lophomyrtus (ramarama), griselinia and pittosporum species all make excellent hedging species. Any garden will benefit from a planting of flax, a few kowhai, a stand of nikau palms and some swathes of hebes. All of these natives are good nectar and pollen producers.

Andrew Steens