Red Maple Flowers & Fruits
Even though it's still January, one of our native trees is already blooming!
Male flowers of Red Maple (Acer rubrum)
AND even starting to produce FRUIT!!
Red Maple branches loaded with fruit (samaras)
When walking and driving around, look for beautiful red tones in the treetops, and when you spot it, wave "Hi" to your local Red Maple.
Flowering Red Maple
Red Maple flowers are an important source of both nectar and pollen for many early-season pollinators. (I'm planning to dig into this more deeply, but for now, here's one source with details about specific bee species that make use of these resources.
Pollination: Red maple flowers are pollinated by both the wind AND by insects!
Feather-legged Scoliid Wasp feeding on Red Maple flowers (male)
* To facilitate WIND pollination, maples flower before they leaf out, so that leaves don't interfere with pollen dispersal.
* To facilitate INSECT pollination, maples reward pollinators for visiting their flowers by producing both nectar (calorie rich) and pollen (nutrient rich).
Sex-wise, maple flowers are ... complicated! Some trees produce only male flowers (with multiple stamens that release pollen), some trees produce only female flowers (with two styles to catch pollen, which fertilize two eggs in the ovary), some trees produce both male and female flowers (but on different branches), and some trees produce "perfect" flowers (which include functional male AND female parts).
Female flowers of Red Maple, with two styles per flower to capture pollen
Successful pollination of a female flower (or perfect flower) produces a single "helicopter" fruit (a samara -- popular with children!) which contains two seeds.
Close-up of Red Maple fruits (samaras)
Maple seeds are wind-dispersed, spinning away from their mother plant, with the "goal" of landing in a favorable place to grow beyond the shade and root competition zone of their parent trees.
Squirrels, woodland mice, and some songbirds (including grosbeaks and finches) feed on the seeds.
January and February can be relatively color-less months, so I'm always cheered by the sight of blooming and fruiting Red Maple trees at this time of year!
Yellow-rumped Warbler foraging in the upper branches of a flowering Red Maple
