Borago officinalis

Borage is 20 to 70 cm tall with stiff prickly hairs and fleshy stems; the lanceolate leaves have wavy, irregularly toothed margins.

The sky-blue, rarely lilac, flowers are 2 to 3 cm across, with a short tube, five flat pointed lobes and protruding white throat scales.

Info Flora gives May to August as the flowering period in Switzerland.

The Czech Pladias database gives June to September as the flowering period and records insect pollination and selfing.

In Switzerland it occurs in vineyards, on waste ground and in sown flower fallows, cultivated and occasionally escaped, in the colline to montane zone.

In a three-year trial in Lublin, Poland, a borage flower produced on average 4.0 mg of nectar at 31.5 percent sugar, or about 1.2 mg of sugar.

The same study measured about 1.1 mg of pollen per flower, and estimated that a square metre of crop yields about 5.2 g each of nectar sugar and pollen.

Bees made up 73 percent of all insect visits to borage flowers in the Polish trial, and pollinators raised fruit set by 43 percent.

LWG Bayern notes that borage nectar and pollen contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids, but its small share and late flowering in mixes only rarely gave positive findings in honey.

LWG Bayern describes borage and pot marigold as good bee forage plants in the first year of a sown wildflower strip.

Info Flora classes borage as a neophyte of originally Mediterranean and West Asian distribution.

German direct-payment rules list Borago officinalis among the pollen- and nectar-rich species allowed on fallow land used for honey plants.