# Oak tree honey?



## wildbranch2007 (Dec 3, 2008)

A google search shows people selling oak honey but all I could find is one entry that the leaves produce a sugar substance in the fall. alot more on pollen, I do know around june some oaks have so many bees that it sounds like a swarm.
http://labs.eeb.utoronto.ca/mcandrews/PDFs/Pollenbeeswind_1978.pdf

mike


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## peletier (May 5, 2007)

Do a Google search for "Honeydew honey". Honeydew is the sweet excretion of certain aphids and scale insects. Honeybees are opportunists and will get their sweets from many sources.

Honeydew honey is poplular in europe where darker stronger honey is more accepted. A Spanish study says it is the most healthful variety because of a higher level of antioxidants. I've tasted Austrailian honeydew honey and would say that a little goes a long way.

Bees do gather pollen from oaks but there are many many varieties of "oaks" and , like other trees and plants, this source can fluctuate.

One more thing: Honeydew honey is isolated the same way as other varietal honey....hives are moved into the forest when the honeydew is flowing. I'm sure there is a bit of aphid excretion  in my honey but it gets lost in the mix.


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## Anthony Ritenour (Mar 17, 2008)

I live in south central Florida in a rural community. We are completely surrounded by oak trees. When I first purchased my house, I kept hearing all of this buzzing and finally after a couple of days saw the bees all over in the trees-this was before I got into beekeeping. This activity lasted for several days. My cars were COVERED in pollen. I just started beekeeping a little more than a year ago and cannot say how much honey they actually make from it. I started beekeeping in the Fall of 07, and last spring my bees paid little attention to the oaks. I think it does go in spurts.


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## samak (Sep 15, 2006)

So do bees make honey from oak flower nectar? (Do oak flowers even have nectar?) Or from those sweet extracts caused by gall insects (as the gall wasp shown in the picture)? Or both from nectar and the sweet extracts of the plant? I know they gather the aphid excretions, however, I'm wondering specifically about the extracts of the plant itself as a result of the gall, as shown in those pictures on the links above. 

If that is the case, then would you still call it 'honeydew honey' even though its not from aphid excretions, but rather from the excretion of the plant as a result of the gall injury?


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## odfrank (May 13, 2002)

Around here they do not make honey from the oak flowers, but honeydew from a node secretion. Live Oak (quercus agrifolia) in spring, I do not know of a crop from this tree. In summer the tan oaks _*(**Lithocarpus densiflorus) do produce extractable surpluses.
*_


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## wmgysi (Feb 14, 2009)

samak said:


> So do bees make honey from oak flower nectar?


I just came across your question and have a link to a more scientific report about honeydew that may help you to understand where the honeydew on oak comes from. http://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/15/5/3744/pdf
Hope that helps


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## Scrapfe (Jul 25, 2008)

samak said:


> I met a Bosnian beekeeper and he was telling me that they get a lot of oak honey in Bosnia...


Aphids suck the sap from the leaves and stems of trees and other plants, you might call aphids the varroa mite of the plant world. These aphids expel plant sugars in excess of the aphids own needs. Some ant species herd aphids for the aphids’ sweet secretions. Bees also collect this aphid dew and make honey from it called “honeydew” honey. I’ve never heard of anyone who “markets” honeydew honey. I’ve been told that it is an acquired taste. But so is maple syrup and maple syrup is also made from tree sap. I’ve also heard honeydew honey is quite popular in Europe and sells at a premium. I assume this is what he was telling you.

Park a car with a clean windshield under an oak tree all day and night and the next morning look for little sticky droplets of dew on the windshield. This I think, is what bees work to make “honeydew” honey. Just MHO.
http://science.jrank.org/pages/462/Aphids-Ants-aphids.html


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## wmgysi (Feb 14, 2009)

I’ve also heard honeydew honey is quite popular in Europe and sells at a premium.

Thanks fo filling in more about hoenydew. Many beekeepers in Europe extract honey after spring and in the fall. The fall honey is usually darker and in German is called "Waldhonig" or forest honey literarely translated.
I have oak trees on my property, one a hughe one. In the later spring it provides pollen. The tree sounds as if a huge swarm would sit in it.


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## jip (Apr 10, 2009)

I read somewhere that oak tree nectar is poisonous to the bees.


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## wmgysi (Feb 14, 2009)

Would you have a source for the information? The link I posted above analyses the oak honey and all the substances that it contains. It does not mention anything about poisenous ones. My bees would be dead by now.


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## edward (Nov 7, 2010)

some aphids don't suck sap , the capillary pressure pushes the sap through the aphid producing a droplet that some ants harvest.

The dark honey tastes like toffee but don ´t tell beecause everybody will what to taste it. :doh:

mvh edward


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## maniatissa (Aug 28, 2011)

I live in Greece and this morning I visited a monastery up in the mountains,from where I usually get pollen, propolis and handmade soaps made with rain water but today together with my favorite chestnut honey, I found oak tree honey! Its does exist! The mongs produce it and only sell it in the monastery! A bit like chestnut honey!LOVE IT!


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## Providence Hills (May 13, 2013)

We live in the timber and have large oak trees in the yard. Yesterday is sounded like the tree was going to fly! The honey bees (started with one 3 lb box and hive last year) were all over the oak tree. I park my old 86 3/4 ton Chevy near the trees and the "honey do" is all over the windshield. I am sure the aphids eat the honey due but the bees were on the leaves and stems drinking the sap from the trees. It has been a cold rainy spring and I am delighted they are getting this from the trees. My persimmon trees should bloom soon and the linden trees won't be far behind. It has been exciting learning about all the things the bees utilize!


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## Harley Craig (Sep 18, 2012)

my persimmon trees have been blooming for 4-5 days now and you can hear the bees on it from 60 ft away. Never knew that bees utilized oak trees, we have 28 acres of woods and have several hundreds of acres of woods within 3 mi of us, sounds like the girls ought to find plenty to eat.


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## BSAChris (Jun 2, 2012)

Harley Craig said:


> my persimmon trees have been blooming for 4-5 days now and you can hear the bees on it from 60 ft away. Never knew that bees utilized oak trees, we have 28 acres of woods and have several hundreds of acres of woods within 3 mi of us, sounds like the girls ought to find plenty to eat.


Harley Craig - completely unrelated to the original post, but related to your post. I used to come to Casey IL several times a year to ride at the Lincoln Trail Motorsport park west of Casey on Hwy 40. Its the first place I ever tried a persimmon, off a tree at the track. I have tried to grow the tree north here (about 6 hours northwest of Casey, but no go. I always think of your town there whenever I see persimmons at the grocery store...


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## spudrocket (Feb 13, 2013)

I have lived in east Texas my whole life where we have post oaks, water oaks, white oaks, balckjack, southern red, and a few others that aren't very common, and i have never seen or heard of bees collecting from oaks. Also, i thought that bees needed pollen to make true honey, and the oaks in my area don't even have flowers, so this doesn't make very much sense to me. I saw something about sugars from aphids but then it really wouldn't be true honey, just sugar stored with the brood, correct? Could anybody please elaborate on this subject?


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## Harley Craig (Sep 18, 2012)

BSAChris said:


> Harley Craig - completely unrelated to the original post, but related to your post. I used to come to Casey IL several times a year to ride at the Lincoln Trail Motorsport park west of Casey on Hwy 40. Its the first place I ever tried a persimmon, off a tree at the track. I have tried to grow the tree north here (about 6 hours northwest of Casey, but no go. I always think of your town there whenever I see persimmons at the grocery store...


Quite ironically I think the first persimmon I ever tried off of a tree was there too I worked there 20 yrs ago as a check point on their enduro races and also ran the drop gate on the moto x side


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

The aphids secrete honey dew as they have to process a lot of sap to pull what little protein it has in it and all the excess sugars they don't need are expelled. The oaks we have the bees visit the little nubs where the acorns form. I'm assuming the tree secretes some nectar at the base as I don't see any aphids but the tree is obviously dripping at times and I see the bees visiting all the nubs and licking them in the fall. That being said, the willow tree is a different story, it's covered in aphids and the bees will be on it collecting the honeydew.


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## casinoken (May 6, 2012)

It doesn't happen every year, but I've had the same thing happen on our pecan tree in our front yard. A couple of different times in the past 5 years I've noticed that the pecan tree would be buzzing with bees seemingly on all the leaves. Other than that, we have 4 Bradford Pear trees that are covered when they bloom, and one Cumberland Pear tree that gets covered when it blooms. I know several beekeepers that have outyards near cropland and others near woods/swamps. They all report that the hives at the woodland/swamp areas produce much higher amounts of honey per hive. I live in a rural area with little farming anywhere nearby, lots of woodland and some low lying areas that we refer to as "swampy". In the spring u can watch my bees leaving their hives and heading straight into the wooded areas. When people begin planting their gardens and flower beds, the bees will then leave the hives heading in different directions.


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## BOYZNUS (May 20, 2012)

My area is primarily Oak trees. The supplier of my nucs says that our bees get constipated from eating their oak honey, and that I should put a little bleach in their water trough to help them "poop". Does that sound right?


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## Connor (Jul 1, 2010)

I have varied areas around my hives. From hay pasture, thick woods, open woods, acres of corn and soybean, run off ditches full of every wild fruit tree imaginable etc. and the bees will at times work oak and other trees. Sometimes they skip a year or with some varieties like the early blooming ones they sometimes cannot get out because of cold or rain. Last year the Honey locust sounded like they had multiple swarms in them while this year I never noticed them being worked but they were working the Box Elder heavily. A couple years ago the girls I noticed they were all over a Pin Oak so maybe it varies from year to year.


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## Honey-4-All (Dec 19, 2008)

BOYZNUS said:


> My area is primarily Oak trees. The supplier of my nucs says that our bees get constipated from eating their oak honey, and that I should put a little bleach in their water trough to help them "poop". Does that sound right?



If I understand this correctly many of the Honeydew honeys really aren't the best for the bees health wise. They are know for causing dysentery in the winter especially on bees that feed on such stores. Many beekeepers will replace late summer / fall honey dew stores with a complete replacement of syrup fed back to the bees. Will bleach help? That I can not answer from experience besides the fact that I know many people through some in as a general "cleanser. "


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Honey-4-All said:


> If I understand this correctly many of the Honeydew honeys really aren't the best for the bees health wise. They are know for causing dysentery in the winter especially on bees that feed on such stores. Many beekeepers will replace late summer / fall honey dew stores with a complete replacement of syrup fed back to the bees. Will bleach help? That I can not answer from experience besides the fact that I know many people through some in as a general "cleanser. "


I have heard this as well but it isn't at all what I observed this past year. We had what I can only describe as, perhaps, a once in a beekeeping lifetime event in the summer of 2012. We had whole bee yards that made an average net of around 60 lbs. per hive of what I now know to be oak tree honeydew. It came in during a time of extreme heat and drought in an area where about the only thing green were a lot of scrub oak trees. We have kept bees on those same locations for decades and had never seen this happen before. Those hives, with brood nests full of honeydew, required no supplemental feed and were our strongest hives coming out of the winter. It's worthwhile to note, though, that the moisture of this "honey" was very low and they overwintered in Texas.


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## MAJ_MALFUNCTION (May 30, 2013)

I'm new to beekeeping and have all of our hives located on our 600+ acre ranch in S.E. OK.

Since our ranch is a "hunting" ranch, we're very tuned in to the mast producing trees (oaks, persimmon, etc.), because they can have a huge effect on the deer herd, turkeys, etc.

I was really surprised to notice "buzzing" trees on different parts of the ranch this Spring and I've tried to study which trees the bees are gravitating towards as the season progresses. It looked (to me) like our bees were going after the catkins in the oaks as a pollen source? It looked as if they were doing the same thing on our pecan trees (which are also a monoecious, with large catkins, just like the oaks).

They also really went after the persimmons for a while. I'm curious if we'll get a better crop of mast from the persimmons this year, since the bees should really help pollination between the male and female persimmon trees.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Bees work lots of different trees in the spring usually primarily for pollen and a few for nectar. This should not be confused with a honeydew flow. The flow we experienced with honeydew was totally unlike any honeyflow that I have ever seen. It was a slow steady progression over maybe a 6 week time frame. There was not a lot of excessive "white work" and never a lot of excitement in the air. If you didn't see the results you would never have guessed it was even going on. We would check the hives and assume whatever they were working had bloomed out, yet a few weeks later another check would show the hives had gained a lot of weight. I never even thought to walk into the oak trees to observe if there was activity in them, though. I was so thoroughly mystified that I sent samples in for pollen testing as my theory at the time was salt cedar from a creek bottom area nearby. The testing yielded virtually no pollen whatsoever. That's when I finally realized that honeydew almost certainly was the source.


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## Providence Hills (May 13, 2013)

The honey bees worked the oak trees for a couple of days and then left them alone. I believe the oaks secreted the sap on the leaves and the bees were utilizing that as well as the excrement from the aphids. Like the one person said, Maple tree sap in boiling down to maple surup.

The top of the leaves were shiny and excreting the sap that the bees were "eating". Now they have moved on the the sweetclover and birdsfoot trefoil. The oak trees look like the leaves have "healed up" and stopped secreting the sap and are back to normal looking. I never noticed the bees on the oak trees before but I never had honey bees until last year and am now "noticing" a lot of things I never notived before. This morning I had two bunches of bees checking out my honey bees traps. My 10 year old grandson is learning and getting excited about honey bees. Last year it never rained until the hurricane brought up the rain in Sept. and we never got a teaspoon of honey and feed sugar water all summer to keep the "package bees" alive. Now they are flying everywhere and I put on an honey super on May 7th. Can't wait for our first honey!


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## Providence Hills (May 13, 2013)

I was glad to hear that the bees "did good" on the honeydue honey. How was the taste? We live in the timber with all kind of trees and many varieties of oak - white oak, red oak, pin oak, post oak - and walnuts, red buds, hard maples, persimmon, elms, linden trees, and many others. The bees have had a steady supply of pollen and nectar this spring. We have hay fields and crop fields nearby.

We have owned this property for 40 years and just started with one hive last year. I sure wish I had gotten honey bees years ago. My neighbor said back in the early 1900's a man name Mart Hendricks owned the property and that he would take empty oak nail kegs and put them in the trees and come back in the winter and get the honey! That's why I think if we have a "normal Year" I should get some honey this year.


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## dadux (Feb 23, 2012)

wmgysi said:


> Would you have a source for the information? The link I posted above analyses the oak honey and all the substances that it contains. It does not mention anything about poisenous ones. My bees would be dead by now.


I was very alarmed when I read that Oak (perhaps English Oak) nectar was Poisonous to Bees. I have many Bur, Red & White Oak on my farm & have not seen any problem.

Here is the information: "**** Oaks are important trees for beekeepers to know about. They bloom in May or June and the nectar is poisonous for bees; when fed to larvae, the larvae can die. It is important to have other nectar sources for honeybees during the oak nectar flow, such as phacelia and borage. The nectar is not poisonous for humans." And it is from: http://www.themelissagarden.com/TMG_Vetaley031608.htm


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