Catsear

Value to bees

Nectar

Moderate

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Not a honey source

Which bees, and why

The essential plant group for Panurgus, which provisions with yellow composite pollen and nothing else, and males of which sleep inside the closed flower heads overnight. Sweat bees and small mining bees work it heavily.

An open composite head with shallow florets, accessible to short-tongued bees of every size.

Worth knowing

A generous and long-running pollen source through the summer months, and moderate for nectar.

Flowering

In flower

June to September (northern hemisphere)

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun on poor, dry, well-drained ground. It thrives in thin lawns, on banks and in gravel, and needs no help of any kind.

Size

20-60 cm tall in flower.

Native range

Europe and North Africa, and naturalised across much of the temperate world.

Suits

Meadow or wildflower area, Small gardens

• It arrives on its own. The useful action is not planting it but leaving it.
• Raise the mower height and cut less often, and it will flower through summer in an ordinary lawn.
• Distinguish it from dandelion by the branched solid stem and the hairy leaves.

What it looks like

A flat rosette of hairy lobed leaves, from which rise wiry branched stems carrying bright yellow dandelion-like flower heads. The branched, leafless, solid stem separates it from dandelion, whose stems are single and hollow.