Have you ever thought about what takes place from the time a honey bee pollinates a Macadamia flower to when you pop that nut in your mouth? It’s quite fascinating – firstly, the flowers are unusual in that the pollen is shed from the anthers of closed flowers, meaning that when the flower opens pollen is mostly found on the style and not the anthers – pollen collecting bees then hover checking the styles, and nectar collecting bees tend to walk over the inflorescences and burrow their heads deep into the flower corolla in search of their nectar reward.
And so starts the process of producing tasty nuts, firstly they form green fruits with hard skins, which picked are left in the sun to naturally dry & crack open. One then pulls the skins off to reveal hard brown nuts.
These nuts are then heated for a very short period in an oven after which you can remove them and crack them open. That process is difficult at best as the shells are very hard, but the result is ever so rewarding in flavour.
