A Mediterranean bee garden

The year runs the other way round

Temperate bee gardening treats winter as the problem and midsummer as the peak. In a Mediterranean climate that is inverted. Almond flowers in February, rosemary from late winter into spring, and the hillsides are at their most productive between February and May. Then the rain stops, the ground bakes, and July and August are a genuine dearth — the season when colonies contract and beekeepers move hives to altitude.

Herbs do almost all of the work

The Lamiaceae — rosemary, thyme, sage, lavender, marjoram, savory, calamint, lemon balm — are Mediterranean natives, adapted to exactly this pattern of wet winter and dry summer, and they are productive nectar plants with flowers short-tongued and long-tongued bees can both use. They also survive containers, poor soil, wind and neglect better than anything else on this site, which makes them the correct answer for a balcony or a paved yard as well as for a hillside.

Water, shade and the things that are not planting

• Provide water. In a Mediterranean summer this matters as much as forage — a shallow dish with stones to land on, refilled, used by colonies for both drinking and evaporative cooling.
• Do not irrigate the herbs. Watering Mediterranean subshrubs through summer produces soft growth, less essential oil and often root rot; drought stress is what they are built for.
• Leave bare sunny ground. The Mediterranean bee fauna is exceptionally rich and overwhelmingly ground-nesting.
• Cut back after flowering, not before. Shearing lavender or rosemary in bud removes the entire forage contribution for that year.