Melilotus officinalis

Plants are 30 to 150 cm tall with trifoliate leaves whose stalked leaflets are oblong-oval to linear and finely toothed.

The yellow, drooping flowers are 5 to 7 mm long, in narrow racemes of 30 to 70 flowers; the pods are hairless with mostly transverse ribs.

Info Flora gives June to October as the flowering period in Switzerland.

The Czech Pladias database gives May to September as the flowering period and records insect pollination with selfing; plants reproduce only by seed.

In Switzerland it grows on roadsides, waste ground, in gravel pits and on river gravels, from the colline to the montane and occasionally subalpine zone.

Info Flora assigns it to the habitat type mesophilous ruderal vegetation, the sweet clover community Dauco-Melilotion.

Polish researchers describe yellow and white sweet clover as attractive and productive nectar plants that bloom from June to late August in Poland.

The British solitary bee Melitta leporina, which prefers white clover, also visits melilot and other legumes.

A study of nine yellow sweet clover honeys from south-eastern Poland selected coumarin as a potential chemical marker for this honey.

Info Flora classes yellow sweet clover as an archaeophyte, present in the region before 1500, with a Eurasian distribution and no Red List concern.

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