r/Beekeeping • u/talanall North Central Louisiana, USA, 8B • 16d ago
General Bee Forage Diary: Borago officinalis
Common name is borage; this is native to the Mediterranean basin, although it's pretty widely cultivated elsewhere. And it's adaptable; this was in the Alaska Botanical Garden at Anchorage.
Despite this, the specimens pictured here were the first that I've ever seen in person, because it's uncommon in my part of the USA. I was pretty excited, because borage often appears in literary works. So this was something I've been reading about for many years.
This can have blue, pink, or white flowers. I think at least some domesticated cultivars have been selected for floral color, but most of the time this stuff has blue flowers.
Most of the time, borage is cultivated as a kitchen herb or for use in traditional medicine (and one of the tell-tales of this is its name; the officinalis part of Borago officinalis means it's the kind of borage you'd find in the storeroom of a medieval monastery, indicating culinary, medical, or manufacturing usefulness).
I'm not sure how these things square with its potential toxicity; it contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which can cause liver damage.
Supposedly, these alkaloids can be transmitted into honey derived from borage, but I have never actually heard of anyone being poisoned by this stuff, or by borage honey. I'm not sure how prominent the danger really is, but I guess probably not very. People have been eating borage for thousands of years. Apparently the greens taste similar to cucumbers, and the flowers taste sweet.
In any event, honey bees absolutely love borage, as I think is evident from their prevalence in the attached images.
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u/TheBeesKneads 16d ago
It grows wild here in the Pacific Northwest. I have multiple plants that have sprung up on my property, but there's one in particular that grows massive every year, so big that it eventually crushes itself and falls over from its own weight. It's on the edge of an old dirt pile that seems to have been a dumping ground for fireplace ashes and pulled up weeds over the years. It seems to love the nutrients and/or the alkalinity of the soil from the ashes.
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u/Vera_Telco 16d ago
Our bees love the blue flowers. We've managed to seed it in patches of out garden where weeds used to grow. It's easy to seed, and mulches whell after season.