Tetradium daniellii Seeds | Bee Bee Tree
LATIN NAME: Tetradium daniellii
COMMON NAME: Bee Bee Tree
Plant Profile
The Bee Bee Tree is a medium deciduous tree of the rue family from the warm hills of northern China and Korea, and beekeepers know it the way gardeners know a rose: by reputation. In late July and August, when the nectar calendar of the temperate garden is nearly blank, it opens broad, flat heads of creamy-white flowers that hum audibly with honeybees from morning to dusk. The large pinnate leaves give a full, rounded crown, and by autumn the flower heads have become dense clusters of shiny black four-lobed fruits that sit on the branches well into winter, taken steadily by birds.
It reaches eight or nine metres in cultivation with a short trunk and handsome, almost tropical foliage, and it flowers while still young, often within five years of sowing. In autumn the leaves colour a quiet yellow before falling.
Science & Biotechnology
The genus Tetradium sits in the rue family close to the herb genus that yields the Chinese medicine Wu Zhu Yu, and the two have been shuffled between Euodia and Tetradium for a century; current treatment keeps the ornamental tree here and the drug plant there. What matters to most growers is the nectar: analyses of honey from regions where the tree is planted show a light, mild crop gathered at a season when colonies are storing winter weight, which is why Korean and northern Chinese beekeepers will drive hives to stands of it. The autumn fruits contain glossy black seeds that birds strip, and the foliage is notably free of the leaf miners and aphids that plague other avenue trees.
Hardiness has been proven in trials well into central Europe, where it flowers reliably despite late frosts because it blooms late in the season by design.
Uses & Benefits
Its garden role is double: it is one of the best pollinator trees in cultivation, filling the late-summer gap that few woody plants touch, and it is a clean, smallish shade tree that takes urban conditions in its stride. The black fruit clusters carry winter interest, the foliage makes a tropical-scale canopy on a modest tree, and the combination has made it increasingly common in temperate street and park planting.
It is not the drug plant: Wu Zhu Yu comes from a different, potent species and belongs in professional hands. This tree’s gift to medicine is indirect, through honey and through the bees it feeds.
Growing from Seed
Give the seed six to eight weeks of cold, moist stratification in damp vermiculite, then sow in spring into a free-draining compost, covering lightly and holding at ordinary greenhouse warmth. Germination is fair and within a few weeks. Prick out the seedlings once they show a pair of true leaves and grow them on in full light.
Plant out into any reasonable soil in full sun, spacing it as the small shade tree it becomes, and water it through the first two summers. It establishes quickly and then needs nothing beyond occasional removal of lower limbs if a clear trunk is wanted. Expect the first flowers within five years and a full nectar crop by the tenth.
Our Take
The tree that hums in August: a modest, clean, hardy shade tree whose flat white heads feed every bee in the neighbourhood at the season that matters most.
Related Reading
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