Wintercress honey plant

Wintercress is a honey plant that is widespread in many countries. Also, rapeseed as a honey plant called rapeseed (spring and winter) is grown in cultivation and included in the honey conveyor.

Content

• Wintercress honey plant
• Wintercress as a honey plant
• Wintercress as a honey plant
• Collegum honey productivity
• How cress blooms in Uzbekistan
• Honey from wintercress
• Properties of wintercress honey
• Wintercress honey properties and benefits
• Wintercress as a pollen carrier
• Wintercress herb honey plant use in folk medicine
• Wintercress honey plant in nutrition
• Other uses of the melliferous cress plant

 

Wintercress honey plant

Common honey plant - Barbarea vulgaris R. Br. Barbarea vulgaris, also called wintercress (usual common name), or alternatively winter rocket, rocketcress, yellow rocketcress, yellow rocket, wound rocket, herb barbara, creases, or crunchy greens. Colises or rapeseed honey plants are widespread everywhere. Wintercress is a biennial weedy honey plant from the cabbage family (Brassicaceae) reaching a height of 20 - 60 cm. As a honey plant, cress is very fond of damp places. It has lower lyre-shaped, pinnately dissected leaves, with a large round-oval terminal lobe. The upper leaves of the cress are sessile, incised-toothed, and ovate. Wintercress flowers are golden yellow, fragrant, with four petals and one pistil. Wintercress inflorescences are dense clusters. The fruits of the cress are opening bent or straight pods. The pods are cylindrical, tetrahedral, with veins that stick out obliquely upward. The honey wintercress grows in fallow fields, pastures, meadows, along roads and ditches. Winter rapeseed and spring rapeseed are actively grown as a fodder and oilseed plant in cultivation.

Wintercress as a honey plant

is cress a honey plant?

Many beekeepers have the question of whether wintercress is a honey plant or not, or whether wintercress is an ordinary honey plant or not, in answer we can say that wintercress is a honey plant that is very valuable for bees. Common cress, like a honey plant, covers green fields with agricultural crops, meadows, and wastelands with bright yellow flowers.
Wintercress as a honey plant blooms from mid-May to August for 70-90 days. When the weather is favorable, bees very actively visit wintercress flowers, collecting nectar and pollen. Bees work on wintercress all day long, but especially hard at lunchtime.
The rapeseed produces nectar, which bees can easily get due to the structure of the flower.
The honey productivity of the wintercress is 35-40 kg per hectare, and sometimes the honey productivity of the wintercress reaches 180 kg of honey per hectare.
The favorable temperature for the release of nectar by wintercress flowers is 23-25 C during the day, and 4-11 C at night.
Honey collection from the wintercress in the spring and early summer fills the fall-free period; the bees actively carry pollen from the wintercress, which prevents swarming and helps build up the strength of colonies for the main honey collection.

 

Collegum honey productivity

Under certain conditions, cress as a honey plant has an advantage over rapeseed. The honey productivity of spring rapeseed is from 120 to 184 kg, and that of rapeseed is 40 to 120 kg. At the same time, spring rapeseed requires fewer treatments with pesticides, which makes rapeseed honey plant even more interesting for beekeepers. In cultivation, winter rapeseed blooms within 25 days. The areas under crops of spring and winter rapeseed amount to tens of thousands of hectares, which makes it possible to obtain commercial honey from rapeseed. A bee colony at a honey harvest from a wintercress can collect 14-22 kg of marketable honey from a wintercress; the weight of a control hive can increase to 8 kg per day and the colonies will develop well by the time of the main honey harvest.
The inclusion of cress as a honey plant in the honey conveyor allows you to extend the total honey collection period by 10 - 15 days.

How cress blooms in Uzbekistan

In the conditions of Uzbekistan, the honey plant cress blooms in mid-April - early May.
The honey plant cress forms thickets along the banks of irrigation ditches. On each honey plant, the wintercress inflorescences begin to bloom from top to bottom, and the flowers in the inflorescence begin to bloom from bottom to top. The flowering time of one cress flower ranges from two to three days.
The honey plant's flowers open at different times. Some flowers bloom in the morning after 7 am. The other part of the cress buds opens at 17-18 hours. In cloudy weather part
Wintercress buds bloom earlier - after 14 hours. Thus, the flowering time of each cress flower depends on a set of conditions: light, temperature, air humidity and other factors. The wintercress flowers do not close at night and wither on the third day.

Honey from wintercress

Good quality wintercress honey. The color of wintercress honey is greenish-yellow, has a pleasant taste, while wintercress honey has a faint aroma. Honey from wintercress quickly crystallizes, literally in 9 days, so it cannot be left to bees as winter food. Therefore, honey from the wintercress is pumped out both from the store and from the nesting frames so that the honey from the wintercress does not crystallize in the cells.

Properties of wintercress honey

Honey collected in Siberia from winter rapeseed had the following properties: the mass fraction of water was 17.2%, the mass fraction of reducing sugars was 90.3%, the mass fraction of sucrose was 2.1%, the diastase number reached -21, 2 units of GOTE, free acidity was at the level of - 18.2 mEq/kg.

Wintercress honey properties and benefits

Honey from wintercress is especially popular in Western European countries - Germany, Austria and others, where it is believed that honey from wintercress has healing properties.

Wintercress as a pollen carrier

Wintercress is a honey plant that provides nectar to bees, but at the same time, cress flowers produce a large amount of pollen, which bees readily collect. Wintercress pollen is bright yellow. Bees form wintercress pollen into a characteristic round and flattened pollen. So if you see bees carrying pollen of a characteristic color and shape into the hive, it means that honey collection has begun with wintercress.
The pollen grains of rapeseed are tricolate, ellipsoidal or spherical in shape. The length of the polar axis is 18.7-22.4 microns, the equatorial diameter is 18.7-20.4 microns. When viewed from the pole, pollen grains are rounded-three-lobed; when viewed from the equator, they are round or elliptical. The grooves are 5-7 microns wide, long, the edges are uneven, the ends are blunt: the membrane of the grooves is granular. The width of the mesocolpium is 11.9-14 microns, the diameter of the apocolpium is 3-4 microns. In the center of the mesocolpium, the exine has a thickness of 1.2-1.8 μm; near the furrows, the exine is thinned due to the rod layer. The rods are thin, on mesocolpiums. 0.8-1 µm in height, with small, rounded heads, 0.2–0.3 µm in diameter, the distance between the rods is 0.7-1.2 µm. The underlying layer of wintercress pollen grains is thin. The sculpture is fine mesh, the mesh is varied, the largest cell diameter is 1 micron, the smallest (at the poles) does not exceed 0.4 microns.

Wintercress herb honey plant use in folk medicine

The common honey plant in folk medicine has such properties as diuretic, stimulant and wound healing. An aqueous infusion of the herb honey wintercress is used for scurvy, paralysis, dropsy, and epilepsy. It is believed that the wintercress plant increases sexual activity and is good for sperm production.

Wintercress honey plant in human nutrition

The honey plant, cress, can be eaten. Both the oil pressed from the seeds of the rapeseed and the young leaves of the plant are used as food. Young wintercress leaves are used for salads. Wintercress leaves are bitter, but if you pour boiling water over the leaves, the bitterness goes away. In addition to salads, wintercress leaves are used to prepare casseroles, soups, purees, and are used as a filling for pies.

Other uses of the melliferous cress plant

Wintercress flowers are used to dye silk yellow. So the honey plant with valuable flowers is not only for bees.