Chestnut as a honey plant
Chestnut as a honey plant is a very valuable plant. Strictly speaking, there are two completely different honey plants among chestnuts. The honey plant is sweet chestnut, it is also a sowing chestnut, it is also an ordinary chestnut, and the second honey plant is horse chestnut. From both chestnuts, the bees collect fine chestnut honey.
Honey plant sweet chestnut or common chestnut
Honey plant sweet chestnut or common chestnut Honey plant sweet chestnut or common chestnut. Sweet chestnut belongs to the beech family, a valuable honey and nut crop.
The chestnut tree reaches a height of 30-35 m. It grows on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus from Dzhubga to Sochi, especially in the Tuapse region. It is also found in Dagestan, on the southern coast of Crimea, in Georgia and in Transcaucasia, it is found in Ukraine and Moldova. Sweet chestnut honey plant grows in the Mediterranean in Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, France, Corsica, Spain. It rises to the mountains up to a height of one and a half thousand meters. An sweet chestnut tree may well grow 200-300 years. In the mountains, chestnut forms a regular round crown. On flat terrain, trees form dense and low boles.
The chestnut bark is dark brown, longitudinally fissured. The leaves of the chestnut are lanceolate or oblong, serrated along the edges, 16-28 cm long and 5-9 cm wide.
Chestnut fruits in a leathery shell of dark brown color of various shapes, round, flattened or ovoid in shape ripen in October-November.
Chestnut nuts are very nutritious and tasty, they contain more than 60% starch and more than 10% sugar, contain proteins and fats, they are consumed raw, boiled and fried. A small admixture of chestnut flour to wheat improves the taste of bread. Chestnut nuts are also used in the confectionery industry.
One mature chestnut tree can produce 50-60 kg of chestnut nuts, from 1 to 3 tons of fruits can be harvested from one hectare of chestnut forest.
All parts of the chestnut have medicinal properties. Fat isolated from fruits is used in medicine. The leaf extract is used for catarrh of the throat, vitamin K is obtained from the leaves, and medicines for indigestion are prepared from the roots.
As an ornamental plant, chestnut is used in landscaping settlements in parks. Chestnut has valuable wood, which has a beautiful texture, is well processed and polished, it is used for valuable furniture, parquet and other products.
Honey plant sweet chestnut or common chestnut
Chestnut as a honey plant produces a large amount of nectar and pollen.
Some works indicate that the potential honey productivity of chestnut plantations can reach up to 500 kg per hectare.
In some regions of Georgia, chestnut, together with linden, is the honey plant of the main honey collection. Chestnut blossoms 8-10 days earlier than linden in the lowland zone in the second decade of June in the mountains with a delay of 7-12 days. Flowering chestnut lasts 14-18 days. The flowers are unisexual, small, white or yellowish with a special pungent odor. Bees during the whole daylight hours visit them very intensively. Under the conditions of Georgia chestnut nectar productivity fluctuates depending on weather conditions in Western Georgia nectar productivity is 270-280 kg per hectare, in Eastern Georgia 225-250 kg.
Sweet chestnut blossoms in the conditions of the Krasnodar Territory after the leaves bloom. Chestnut begins to bloom in low places and in light forests starting from June 10 - 15, in the mountains it blooms in early July, chestnut blossoms are abundant, lasts 15-18 days, chestnut flowers are collected in long spike-shaped inflorescences, female flowers are located on the lower part of the flower stem flowers, and above male, the flowers are whitish with a yellow tint, which smell pleasant and collected three or more in a ball.
Long inflorescences of male flowers, reaching a length of 10-20 cm, give the tree a special decorative effect, this is especially noticeable in windy weather. The female flowers, greenish in color, form globules, usually of three flowers. The chestnut flowers are eagerly visited by bees.
The chestnut is a good pollen bearer, it releases a huge amount of pollen that the bees willingly collect.
For beekeeping, the sweet chestnut is interesting for the following points, it is a good stable honey plant, if the linden does not give a good honey flow every year, then chestnuts have a good honey flow almost every year.
In the Krasnodar Territory, due to the large release of pollen, chestnut helps to develop queen breeding farms and batch farms.
In chestnut forests, it is quite acceptable to carry out pollination with the help of bees, because experiments have shown that at a distance of 1 km from the apiary, the yield of sweet chestnut nuts fell by half, compared with the yield of chestnut within 300 m from the apiary.
When collecting honey from an sweet chestnut in the conditions of the North Caucasus, the control hive can show brought 4-6 kg per day.
horse chestnut honey plant
Horse chestnut honey plant is a tree from the horse chestnut family. A beautiful extremely attractive tree, a compact and extensive pyramidal crown, with foliage like a dark green fan adorn the tree. The bark of the chestnut trunk is dark brown, cracking. Old chestnut branches are brownish-gray, young shoots are yellowish-brown, glabrous. Horse chestnut leaves are opposite, petiolate, rounded, up to 25 cm in diameter, palmately compound, consisting of 5-7 sessile leaflets. Leaflets are wedge-shaped, obovate, pointed at the apex, unevenly biserrate, dark green above, wrinkled, lighter below, pubescent along the veins with red hairs. Horse chestnut flowers are quite large, brightly colored bisexual. On the white petals of the flowers, you can see multi-colored spots, at the beginning all the spots are yellow, then the spots become orange and finally carmine red. A change in the color of the spot occurs simultaneously with a change in the smell emanating from the flower. It is interesting that the yellow color of the spot with its special smell - a signal for bees means the presence of nectar, with an orange and red color there is no nectar in the flower.
In places where there is a lot of horse chestnut, the Caucasus, Ukraine, the southern regions of Russia, they get marketable honey from horse chestnut, since horse chestnut is a good honey plant. One flower produces 1.7 mg of nectar, the nectar contains 65-75 percent sucrose. Horse chestnut honey is liquid, transparent and usually colorless; it is not left for the winter because it crystallizes easily. But as a rule, honey from horse chestnut goes to the development of bee colonies.
Horse chestnut is a very decorative tree, so it is used for landscaping in the south and in the central regions, while many different decorative forms of chestnut are bred, such as narrow pyramidal, weeping, umbrella-shaped and others. All forms of horse chestnut are good honey plants, except for the form with double flowers.
At a young age, the chestnut can freeze slightly in the northern regions, but if it gets stronger, the chestnut blooms at the latitude of Moscow.
Horse chestnut is easily propagated by seed, but a guaranteed way to propagate chestnut seedlings is when the seeds are initially planted in a school, and then the resulting seedling is transplanted to a permanent place.
Horse chestnut blossoms in May - June. In the southern and central regions of Ukraine at the latitude of Poltava, it blooms in May, releases a lot of nectar and pollen. The honey productivity of horse chestnut is 25 kg per 1 ha. From urban plantations of horse chestnut, you can get a control hive weight gain of 2 kg every day. In addition, horse chestnut is a source of propolis, before the leaves bloom, bees collect sticky substances from its buds from which propolis is made.
Horse chestnut preparations are used for the prevention and treatment of postoperative thrombosis, post-traumatic edema, inflammation and thromboembolism. Alcoholic extract of horse chestnut fruits lowers blood pressure, stimulates cardiac activity, dilates blood vessels. With thrombophlebitis, chestnut fruit extract reduces the overall inflammatory response and local edema.
