Editing Caryocar brasiliense (section)

== Flowering, fruiting, and harvest ==

Flowers open at dusk and are pollinated mainly by nectar-feeding bats; the bats recorded on the flowers in the field study are ''Glossophaga soricina'' and ''Anoura geoffroyi''. <sup>[[#cite_note-5|[5]]]</sup> Moths, hummingbirds, and daytime bees also visit the flowers. Nocturnal bees that collect pollen and nectar do not contribute to fruit set: flowers exposed to bee-only visitation set almost no fruit in an exclusion experiment. <sup>[[#cite_note-5|[5]]]</sup>

Growth is slow and wild trees begin fruiting very late. In a central Brazil (Distrito Federal) population, a tree with a 7.3 cm stem was estimated at 30-51 years old at first fruiting, and the largest stem measured (43 cm) at 110-153 years; these ages apply to wild, seed-grown trees, not to grafted orchard stock. <sup id="cite_ref-13">[[#cite_note-13|[13]]]</sup> Whole-stand production was also highly variable between years and tracked annual precipitation: 1,004 fruits/ha (72.9 kg/ha) one year versus 299 fruits/ha (21.7 kg/ha) the next. <sup>[[#cite_note-13|[13]]]</sup>

Natural fruit set is extremely low. In a Cerrado study, 2.92% of flowers developed into fruit in a degraded area and 2.71% in a preserved area, with high seed abortion (64.5%, possibly from selfed pollen); manual cross-pollination and open pollination set more fruit than self-pollination. <sup id="cite_ref-14">[[#cite_note-14|[14]]]</sup>

In the shrubby dwarf form, pollination shifts from bats to large diurnal bees near the southern limit of the Cerrado: flowers are smaller, open later, and secrete sucrose-enriched, hexose-dominant nectar that peaks in the early morning. There, bee visits were more than 50 times more frequent than bat visits and increased fruit and seed set, with no difference in genome size between the forms. <sup id="cite_ref-15">[[#cite_note-15|[15]]]</sup>

Fruits mature from November to February and are harvested after they fall; keeping some fruit on the plant is the sustainable practice, and Brazilian rules prohibit harvesting fruit from the tree before it falls. <sup>[[#cite_note-6|[6]]]</sup> <sup>[[#cite_note-12|[12]]]</sup> Outside the native range, flowering and harvest will track the local dry-wet cycle rather than a fixed calendar.