Chives
Allium schoenoprasumAmaryllidaceaeHerbaceous perennial
The most useful herb a small garden can grow for bees, carrying dense purple pompom heads in May and June that are worked continuously. It is a genuine wild plant as well as a kitchen staple, and cutting it back after flowering produces a second flush.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- High
- Pollen
- High
- As a honey crop
- Not a honey source
- Which bees, and why
- Each pompom is a head of many small tubular flowers, giving a bee dozens of visits without flying. Worked by bees, hoverflies and butterflies alike.
Small tubular flowers gathered into a dense head that acts as a landing platform.
- Worth knowing
- A generous nectar and pollen source in a plant almost every garden already has.
Flowering
- In flower
- May to July (northern hemisphere)
A late-spring flow, with a second flush after cutting back.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Sun or light shade on moisture-retentive soil. Fully hardy and thoroughly undemanding.
- Size
- 20-40 cm tall in flower.
- Native range
- Europe, Asia and North America, on damp rocky grassland. Genuinely wild as well as universally cultivated.
- Suits
- Containers and window boxes, Small gardens, Large gardens
- Let some of the clump flower rather than cutting it all for the kitchen — this is the single most useful thing to do with chives.
- Cut back hard after flowering for fresh leaves and often a second flush of flowers.
- Divide every three or four years; congested clumps flower less.
What it looks like
Dense clumps of hollow grassy leaves with rounded pompom heads of small mauve-purple flowers on slender stems.
Sources
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
- Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production — Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (2016) · Systematic review Link
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this plant
- How to make a garden genuinely useful to beesMost bee-friendly advice covers flowers in June, which is the one thing bees are least short of. The gaps are at the ends of the year — and half the problem is not flowers at all.
- Bee plants for a small gardenA small garden cannot do everything, so it should do the things large gardens usually skip: the winter and early spring gaps, and nesting habitat. Both take almost no space.
- Bee plants for a balconyBees will find a balcony several floors up, and containers can be genuinely productive. The constraints are watering, wind and depth, and the plants that handle all three are mostly Mediterranean herbs.
- The vegetable garden as bee habitatThe one part of a garden where the relationship runs both ways: bees decide the size of the crop, and the crop — plus what is allowed to bolt beside it — feeds the bees.
Tools for planning planting
- Flowering calendar
What should I plant so that something is always in flower for bees?
- Bee-friendly garden planner
What should I plant in the space I actually have?
- Plant recommendation tool
Which plant fills this specific gap?