Rubus idaeus

The plant is 50 to 150 cm tall and deciduous, with round first-year canes that are bluish-bloomed at first and bear fine dark violet prickles up to 2 mm long.

The leaves are three-parted or, on the canes, pinnate with five or seven leaflets that are densely white-felted beneath; the flowers are white with narrow-oval petals about 5 mm long.

The red, roughly globular fruit about 1 cm across separates from the cone-shaped receptacle when picked.

Info Flora gives the flowering time of raspberry in Switzerland as May to July.

Info Flora lists raspberry as indigenous in Switzerland, growing in forest clearings and rocky scree from the hill to the subalpine and occasionally alpine zone.

The Czech Pladias database gives insect pollination and selfing, with honeybee and bumblebees listed first in the pollinator spectrum, followed by flies and butterflies.

In a Polish plantation study, six raspberry cultivars produced on average 20.2 to 26.4 mg of nectar per flower with a sugar concentration of 34.6 to 47.3 percent.

Expressed as sugar, these Polish cultivars secreted 6.9 to 12.2 mg of sugar per flower.

The same paper states that raspberry flowers are mainly visited by bumblebees, honeybees, solitary bees and flies.

A Scottish doctoral study of wild and cultivated raspberry found bumblebees responsible for about 60 percent of all flower visits, with honey bees, Andrena species and hoverflies making up most of the rest.

In that Scottish study, young raspberry flowers offered both nectar and pollen, while medium-aged and old flowers offered nectar only, in diminishing quantity.

Citing earlier literature, the Polish authors give an estimated honey yield of 42.8 to 238.2 kg per hectare for raspberry.