A bee-friendly garden in Britain and Ireland

What the British climate gives you

An oceanic climate with mild wet winters is poor for ripening honey and unusually good for forage continuity. Bumblebee queens fly in February in southern England, buff-tailed bumblebees now maintain winter-active colonies in urban areas, and ivy carries the season into November. A garden here can realistically offer something in eleven months of twelve, which a continental garden at the same latitude cannot.

The cost is at the other end. Nectar secretion needs warmth, and a cool wet summer produces flowers that yield nothing — which is why British beekeepers talk about the weather more than about their bees, and why lime can be spectacular one July and empty the next.

The two gaps worth planting for

1. 1Late winter, roughly FebruaryQueens emerging from hibernation need forage before anything much is out. Hazel and goat willow supply the pollen that matters most here, crocus and snowdrop the accessible early nectar, and lungwort is the single best small-garden plant of the period because it flowers for weeks and suits shade.
2. 2The June gapSpring blossom is over, high summer has not started, and colonies are at their largest. Clover in an unmown lawn, bird's-foot trefoil, knapweed and field scabious cover it, and bramble left in a hedge covers it better than anything you can buy.

The hedge, which does more than the border

Hawthorn, blackthorn, crab apple, dog rose, elder, alder buckthorn and bramble between them cover March to September, and hedge bases give the undisturbed ground and leaf litter that mining bees and overwintering queens need. Almost all of these flower on second-year wood, so an annually trimmed hedge produces nothing at all — cutting on a two or three-year rotation, in late winter rather than late summer, transforms it at no cost.

Alder buckthorn is worth singling out: it is the larval food plant of the brimstone butterfly, flowers inconspicuously for weeks, and is a genuinely useful nectar source for short-tongued bees during the June gap.

Autumn belongs to ivy

Nothing else in a British garden compares. Ivy flowers in September and October when almost everything else has finished, produces both nectar and pollen abundantly, and supports the ivy bee — Colletes hederae — which arrived in Britain in 2001 and has spread north since. Mahonia and Michaelmas daisy extend the shoulders, but ivy does the work, and the only thing required is not cutting it before it flowers.

What Britain exports that other countries do not want

This section exists because these guides are read across borders. The following are all good or excellent bee plants in Britain and Ireland and all of them are serious problems somewhere else.

• Gorse — invasive in New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Hawai'i and the Pacific Northwest, forming fire-prone thickets.
• Broom — the same list, and a major control target in the western United States.
• Bramble — seriously invasive in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Northwest.
• Ivy — invasive across parts of North America and Australasia.
• Viper's bugloss — a declared weed in parts of Australia, where it is known as Paterson's curse.
• Purple loosestrife — severely invasive in North American wetlands and prohibited in many states.
• Oxeye daisy, teasel, knapweed and common ragwort — all listed weeds somewhere in North America or Australasia.