Which flowers make honey

The four conditions for a honey crop

1. 1AbundanceThe plant must cover a large area. A colony forages up to three kilometres, and the crop comes from what dominates that circle.
2. 2GenerosityIt must secrete nectar in quantity. Many excellent garden plants produce small volumes and feed bees without ever yielding a surplus.
3. 3SynchronyIt must flower more or less at once. A plant that trickles produces colony food; a plant that floods produces honey.
4. 4TimingIt must flower when the colony has enough foragers to exploit it and is not simply eating what it collects.

That combination is why the world's honey crops are mostly trees, field crops and landscape-scale scrub — and why the best plants for a garden are almost never honey plants.

The great honey plants

Good for bees, not a honey crop

Some of the most valuable plants in this catalogue never produce a surplus. Ivy flows heavily but arrives when colonies are provisioning for winter and consume it. Willow produces critical spring pollen and modest nectar. Borage feeds bees superbly and rarely fills a super unless it is grown as a field crop. Crocus, lungwort and mahonia are all valuable and all yield nothing.

The honeys that come from no flower at all

Honeydew honeys — fir, spruce, pine, oak, beech, metcalfa, mopane — come from the sugary excretions of aphids and scale insects feeding on plant sap. No flower is involved at any point, and the trees in question are wind-pollinated and offer no nectar whatsoever.

This is the clearest reason nectar and pollen are rated separately in this catalogue. A single bee-friendliness score would rate silver fir as worthless, when it is one of Europe's most important honey trees.

Two-way and one-way relationships

In some cases the plant benefits as much as the bee. Shea nut yields rise substantially with bee access; cashew, macadamia, apple and blueberry all set better with insect visits. In others the relationship is one-sided: sweet orange is self-fertile and does not need the bees at all, and baobab is bat-pollinated with bees taking nectar from a flower that owes them nothing.