Sinapis alba

White mustard resembles charlock, but its flower stalks are at least as long as the sepals and the petals are 7 to 10 mm long.

The pods are 3 to 4 mm thick, strongly bristly, with 4 to 8 seeds and a clearly flattened beak 10 to 25 mm long.

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

The Czech Pladias database gives May to July as the flowering period and records insect pollination; the plant is an annual 0.3 to 1.2 m tall.

In Switzerland it grows on fields, roadsides and waste ground in warmer areas, formerly cultivated as a fodder plant and escaped.

In Polish trials of 75 white mustard breeding lines, nectar per 10 flowers ranged from 2.3 to 24.4 mg, and most lines gave over 2 mg of sugar per 10 flowers.

Pollen per 10 flowers ranged from 1.2 to 12.0 mg in the same trials, with 8.5 mg for the reference cultivar Nakielska.

Honeybees made up 93 percent of all insects visiting white mustard flowers in the Polish trials.

The Baden-Württemberg bee forage catalogue names mustard, with phacelia, summer turnip rape and oil radish, as catch crops especially suited as food for pollinators.

Info Flora classes white mustard as an archaeophyte of originally eastern Mediterranean origin, present in the region before 1500.

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

The Bavarian LfL includes white mustard at 5 percent in its wild seed mix for winter greening in maize rotations.