Autumn plants for bees

Why autumn matters

Three things depend on autumn forage. Honey bee colonies are rearing the winter bees that will carry them to spring, and those bees need pollen. Bumblebee colonies are producing next year's queens, which is the only part of their year that matters reproductively. And solitary bees with late seasons — the ivy bee above all — are provisioning cells for the following year.

A poor autumn produces fewer and weaker winter bees, fewer mated bumblebee queens, and fewer solitary bee offspring. The effect shows up the following spring rather than immediately, which is why it is easy to overlook.

Ivy, which does most of the work

Ivy flowers from late September into November, when almost nothing else does. It produces nectar and pollen in quantity, its flowers are completely open and accessible to every insect, and it supports an enormous late-season community — honey bees, wasps, hoverflies, butterflies, and the ivy bee, a solitary species whose entire life cycle is timed to it.

It also produces a honey: pale, fast-setting and slightly bitter, and disliked by many beekeepers because it granulates hard in the comb. That is a beekeeping inconvenience rather than a problem with the plant.

The rest of the autumn list

What to leave alone in autumn

• Do not cut perennial stems back in autumn. Hollow and pithy stems are overwintering sites, and cutting in late winter instead costs nothing.
• Leave seedheads standing — teasel, knapweed, thistle — for birds and for the invertebrates sheltering in them.
• Leave leaf litter where you can. Bumblebee queens hibernate in it and in loose soil beneath it.
• Do not clear ivy from walls and trees in autumn, which removes the flow at its peak.
• Leave a log pile. It is nesting and overwintering habitat and it looks like nothing.