The best plants for bees

The top tier

Why accessibility matters as much as quantity

A plant that produces a great deal of nectar in a deep tube is useless to a short-tongued bee. Foxglove is an excellent bumblebee plant and offers nothing to a yellow-faced bee. Hogweed and wild carrot produce less nectar per flower and are usable by almost every insect alive, which frequently makes them more valuable overall.

The rule for a garden is to include both. Deep flowers for long-tongued bumblebees, and flat open umbels and composites for the small solitary bees that everything else excludes.

What to avoid

• Fully double cultivars of anything.
• F1 bedding plants bred for display rather than reward.
• Highly bred pansies, petunias and busy lizzies, which offer very little.
• Anything sprayed with insecticide, whatever it is.
• Wildflower mixes full of non-native annuals, which look good for one year and do far less than a perennial meadow.

The list nobody plants

Several of the most productive plants for bees are ones no garden centre sells, because they are weeds. Dandelion is one of the most important early pollen sources in Europe. Bramble carries the midsummer season. Ivy, hogweed, ragwort, catsear and knapweed between them do more for British bees than any planting scheme.

The practical implication is that letting part of a garden alone is frequently more effective than buying plants for it, and it is free.

The reliable performers

The ones worth singling out

Viper's bugloss is the outlier on output. Its flowers refill with nectar within minutes of being emptied, which means a bee can work the same plant repeatedly rather than moving on. Measured nectar production per unit area puts it among the highest of any temperate plant.

Calamint deserves more attention than it gets. It flowers from July until the first hard frost, needs no water, and its tiny flowers are accessible to small solitary bees that most border plants exclude entirely.

Catmint and woodland sage share a useful property: cut them back by two-thirds after the first flush and they flower again within weeks, and again after that. Two plants doing four months of work is better value than four plants doing one month each.

Annuals worth growing

• Phacelia — sown as green manure, and among the most heavily worked plants there is if allowed to flower.
• Borage — refills nectar rapidly and self-seeds indefinitely from one sowing.
• Poached egg plant — smothered in accessible flowers and attracts hoverflies for aphid control.
• Cosmos and single zinnias — long-flowering and genuinely useful in single-flowered forms only.
• California poppy — abundant pollen and no nectar at all, which is worth knowing.

Choosing for a specific bee

If you want a particular bee, plant its plant. Harebell brings the harebell carpenter bee. Catsear and hawkbits bring the shaggy bees. Small scabious brings the large scabious mining bee. Bird's-foot trefoil and vetches bring the long-tongued specialists. These are the bees that generic bee-friendly planting does not reach, because they cannot use generic flowers.