Allium

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Feeds the colony but rarely yields a surplus

Which bees, and why

Worked by honey bees, bumblebees and a wide range of small solitary bees. Chives in flower are often the busiest thing in a kitchen garden, and the onion scent does not deter bees in the slightest.

Small fully open florets with exposed nectar, massed on a sphere — accessible to everything, including very small bees and hoverflies.

Worth knowing

Good for both from an entirely accessible flower shape, and available from a plant most vegetable gardens already contain.

Flowering

In flower

April to August (northern hemisphere)

Chives flower in May and again in late summer if cut back; the large ornamental alliums flower in May and June; wild garlic flowers in April in woodland.

When nectar flows

Generous nectar in fully open florets, with hundreds per head. The umbel opens in succession so a single head remains productive for a fortnight or more.

Year-to-year variation

Very dependable. Not a honey crop, though nectar production per head is substantial.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun and well-drained soil for the ornamentals; wild garlic wants damp woodland shade.

Size

20 cm for chives to 1.5 m for the large ornamental species.

Native range

The northern hemisphere, with major diversity in central Asia and the Mediterranean.

Suits

Containers and window boxes, Small gardens, Large gardens, Orchard, Meadow or wildflower area

• Let chives flower rather than cutting them constantly for the kitchen, and cut them back after flowering for a second flush in late summer.
• Let a few leeks and onions bolt deliberately. A flowering leek is a metre-tall sphere covered in bees and costs nothing but the vegetable.
• Ornamental alliums leave untidy dying foliage as they flower — plant them behind something that hides it.
• The dried seed heads stand all winter and look better than most things in frost.

What it looks like

Strap or tubular leaves smelling of onion when crushed, and rounded umbels of small six-petalled star-shaped flowers in purple, pink, white or yellow held on bare stems.