What's happening with the beech nuts?

It's been five or six years since the last good beech nut drop. Has anyone out there seen beech nuts in the woods lately, or even not so recently? I've hiked in plenty of beech woods during all seasons and see lots of young beech trees coming up, but no beech nuts either on the trees or on the ground. They seem to be blossoming normally but are not setting seed. Can others confirm my observations? If it's really so, has anyone heard an explanation for it?

This is from Reading the Forested Landscape, but I may be wrong. If individual trees drop their own nuts, every nut may be lost to a scavenger. So trees that are close to one another somehow communicate such that in one year, they will all drop unusually large numbers of nuts, hopefully allowing some of them to take root since there will be too many for the scavengers to collect.

Brian

Beech nuts do seem to be very unreliable, most years my beeches didnt have any nuts and then there would be one good year where they were loaded. Unfortunately for the local animals, the northern whites are at or above the northernmost limit for oaks (which are somewhat more consistent bearing nuts) so it makes mast production really inconsistent.

B the Hiker said:

This is from Reading the Forested Landscape, but I may be wrong. If individual trees drop their own nuts, every nut may be lost to a scavenger. So trees that are close to one another somehow communicate such that in one year, they will all drop unusually large numbers of nuts, hopefully allowing some of them to take root since there will be too many for the scavengers to collect.

Click to expand...

You also need sparse years in between the plentiful years. The sparse years limit the predator population so that the plentiful years can produce more nuts than the predators can consume.

Doug

We have several 150-175 year old oaks and a much younger hickory and the past two years produced tremendous quantities of nuts. This year has been comparatively sparse for both. Even after all these years I haven't been able to find a correllation between that mast and the severity of the upcoming winter ... only that the previous season was less helpful, i.e. drier this year, for good production. It also means relief from the din of nuts bouncing off the skylights. ... anyone got any yankee wisdom on nut production and winter?

We had a monster beech nut crop last year, best I've seen in eleven years in NH. But 2012 has been a bust for beeches and wild apples. If weren't for this year's relatively good crop of acorns, the bears would have been beating down your doors by now ...

A little Googling goes a long way with a question like this. I stumbled upon this scienetific paper published by USFS about a study conducted in New Hampshire about Beech nut production. Beech nut production is very complicated mix of predation by insect, bird, rodents. Report does say that good years occur about once every 3 years. The older and bigger the trees in the stand is better the production. The flowers are single sex catkins ie pollination is via wind so environmental factors could negatively influence basic seed production for example the early spring conditions followed by surprise frost such as messed up NH apple crops in 2012.

http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_square/publications/research_papers/pdfs/scanned/OCR/ne_rp677.pdf