Valentine’s Day Almond Blossoms

One Valentine’s Day my students witnessed in our classroom a seemingly lifeless eight foot almond branch burst into full bloom.  The prior afternoon I had been pruning a local orchard and noted that the swelling flower buds would soon open.  I took the large almond branch to my middle school science classroom and put its base in a bucket of water. The top of the branch touched the ceiling.  Within days the entire branch was radiant with white flowers. Flowers of deciduous fruit and nut trees require hundreds of hours of chilling below 45 degrees.  Flower buds begin to swell when the required chilling has occurred and warmer temperatures arrive. Once those hours are reached outdoors the stems with flower buds can be cut and taken indoors to bloom.  Smaller and much more common floral arrangements with fruit and nut tree blossoms work well. My students learned that dormant stems with mature flower buds can bloom indoors to make quite a show.

A farm adviser I know once favored pink flowering almond varieties for Valentine’s Day.  Warm winters like this one (2011-2012) however find almond trees flowering in late January here in Ramona on Magnolia Avenue. Pink flowering almonds appear perfect for Valentine’s Day but they produce bitter almonds which contain cyanide unlike the standard sweet varieties like Nonpareil Almonds.

Almonds are the first to bloom of the common fruit and nut trees that lose their leaves in the winter. But why do fruit trees blossom before growing new shoots with leaves?  It turns out that the bees can see the blossoms from a greater distance if the trees bloom before they develop leaves.  Bees can travel up to a mile to collect nectar so being visible from a distance increases the chances that fruit tree flowers will be pollinated. Many fruit and nut varieties require pollination from another variety and the help of hardworking insect pollinators.

The almond pollination season in California traditionally begins around Valentine's Day.  The vast numbers of almond flower petals signal the coming of spring growth and the end of my winter pruning season. These blossoms also remind me of the first time I moved a beehive into an almond orchard as an undergraduate.  My friend Mark encouraged me to help him. “Don’t worry” he said, “Bees don’t fly at night. I learned that evening that bees don’t sleep either and crawl like heck if upset or moved.  Luckily it was a mellow beehive and no more than a couple stings were received.

Each February, for the next four years, I would continue to move my lonely beehive into a Winters, California, almond orchard to provide pollination in exchange for gleaning privileges. After the harvest, later in the year, I would recruit my friends to help me collect the almonds that the mechanized sweeper missed.  Luckily for us, the sweeper left a small pile of unshelled almonds and their husks at every turn.  Within a couple hours we would fill our duffle bags with enough almonds to last a year. My industrious bees kept me in tune with the annual almond production cycle starting with the first blossoms near Valentine’s Day.