Dandelion

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Very high

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Worked by honey bees, emerging bumblebee queens, mining bees, hoverflies and beetles. The flat composite head is effectively a landing platform with hundreds of tiny florets on it, which is about as easy as forage gets.

Each floret is a short tube with easily reached nectar and fully exposed pollen — accessible to the shortest-tongued insects and to non-bee pollinators alike.

Worth knowing

The pollen is what makes it critical. It arrives when colonies are expanding fastest and have the least in reserve, and bumblebee queens emerging from hibernation depend on early sources like this one to found a nest at all.

Flowering

In flower

March to October (northern hemisphere)

A heavy peak in April and May, then scattered flowering right through to autumn. It is the April flush that matters — that is when almost nothing else is available at scale.

When nectar flows

Flower heads close in dull weather and at night and open in sun, so the forage is genuinely available only on bright days. Both nectar and pollen are offered in quantity.

Year-to-year variation

Reliable as forage almost everywhere. A honey surplus only in grassland regions with an early flush and little competing bloom — parts of Poland, the Baltic states and the Alps.

What it does to the honey

Dandelion nectar produces a vivid yellow honey with a sharp, pungent, faintly barnyard character and a very high glucose share, so it sets hard within weeks. It is one of the strongest-flavoured spring honeys and nothing like the mild sweetness the flower suggests.

Growing it

Conditions

Anywhere. That is rather the point of it.

Size

5-40 cm.

Native range

Europe and Asia, introduced worldwide — often deliberately, as a food and medicinal plant, by European settlers in the Americas and Australasia.

Suits

Meadow or wildflower area, Small gardens, Large gardens

• Nobody needs to plant dandelions. The useful action is to not cut them in April — delaying the first mow by two or three weeks is a genuine and free contribution to early forage.
• The evidence that dandelions alone can sustain pollinator populations is weaker than the campaigns suggest; dandelion pollen is not nutritionally complete for honey bees. It is an excellent early source and not a substitute for diversity.
• Leaves, flowers and roots are all edible, and the plant was introduced to North America deliberately as a vegetable and medicinal.

What it looks like

A rosette of deeply toothed leaves and a single hollow milky-sapped stem bearing one composite flower head made of many bright yellow ray florets, followed by the familiar spherical seed clock.