Plants that attract honey bees specifically

The constraint that decides everything

A honey bee's tongue is around six millimetres. A garden bumblebee's is up to sixteen. That single difference determines which flowers each can feed from, and it is why 'attracts bees' on a plant label means almost nothing on its own.

Red clover has a corolla around nine to ten millimetres deep. A field of it in flower can be loud with bumblebees and almost empty of honey bees, which is why virtually all commercial clover honey comes from white clover, whose florets are shallow. Comfrey, foxglove and summer honeysuckle are the same story in a garden: excellent nectar plants that honey bees cannot use through the front door.

What honey bees actually want

• Shallow or open flowers. Anything with exposed nectar or a short corolla — umbellifers, composites, the rose family, mints with short tubes.
• Massed flowers on one plant. Honey bees are efficient foragers and prefer to work a large patch without flying between plants, which is why a single flowering tree or a solid block of one species beats a scattered mixture.
• Flower constancy suits them. A forager works one species per trip, so a large stand of one plant is worth more to her than the same number of flowers spread across six species.
• Trees above all. A mature lime, sycamore, horse chestnut or crab apple offers more forage than an entire border, and honey bees find it from kilometres away.

The plants that disappoint

• Anything double. Double flowers have converted the pollen-bearing or nectar-producing parts into extra petals. Double cosmos, calendula, hellebores and roses are largely useless, and the single forms of the same species are excellent.
• Deep tubular flowers. Foxglove, comfrey, summer honeysuckle, penstemon and the long-tubed salvias are bumblebee, moth or hummingbird plants. Grow them — just not for honey bees.
• Buddleia, despite the reputation. It is a genuinely outstanding butterfly plant with a long narrow corolla, very little accessible pollen, and only moderate value to bees.
• Bedding plants bred purely for display. Many modern bedding cultivars are sterile or effectively nectarless, and a hanging basket can be entirely decorative in the literal sense.
• Red flowers, generally. Bees cannot see red as a distinct colour — their vision runs into the ultraviolet at the other end — so red flowers are usually signalling to birds. Bees do visit some of them, guided by ultraviolet patterns invisible to us, but red is not a bee signal.

One honest caveat