Since I wrote about bigleaf maple honey, several people have asked if other maple species produce honey. I dug around a bit and found that most maples are excellent producers of both nectar and pollen. However, they bloom very early in the spring–generally from February to April–and most of the time the weather is just too cold or too wet for the honey bees to collect much. What they do collect is often consumed immediately in order to build comb and raise brood for spring.
So it seems that any harvestable maple honey is a hit or miss, weather dependent kind of thing . . . but some species are more reliable than others.
Here in North America several sources named red maple (Acer rubrum) , sometimes called swamp maple, as producing an occasional honey crop. Likewise, sugar maples (A. saccharum) and silver maples (A. saccharinum) are extremely attractive to honey bees and may, on occasion, produce a harvestable crop.
Vine maple (A. circinatum) grows out here in the same region as the bigleaf maples (A. macrophyllum). John Lovell in his book Honey Plants of North America (1926) writes of vine maple, “The honey has a fine flavor and is white or amber-colored with a faint pinkish tinge.”
So if you want a taste of maple, you may have to raid a brood box as I described earlier. Don’t take so much that you hurt your spring build-up and be careful not to chill your brood in the process. Still, if you can swing it, it is definitely worth the effort.
Rusty
Honey bee on red maple flower. Photo courtesy of Scott Famous.
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