Daisy family
Asteraceae · 32 plants
The largest plant family on earth and the most generous to bees in late summer. What looks like one flower is hundreds, and that architecture is the whole reason it works.
Plant families for bees
Bee plants grouped by botanical family — the most useful predictive unit in bee gardening, because flower shape and nectar accessibility are largely inherited at family level.
30 families · 296 plants in the catalogue
Why family is worth knowing
Corolla depth, floret arrangement and whether nectar is exposed or protected are inherited traits, so they run in families. A gardener who knows the mint family is reliably good and the buttercup family is mostly pollen has learned something that applies to plants nobody has catalogued — which a list of individual species never gives you.
The catalogue holds seventy-four families. Only those with at least three records appear here, because a page built on one plant is a stub with a Latin name on it.
Mint family
Lamiaceae · 27 plants
The single most reliable family for a bee garden, and the source of most of the world's great herb honeys. Nearly every member is worth planting.
Rose family
Rosaceae · 24 plants
Every orchard fruit worth eating, and the family that feeds bees through the critical weeks of spring when a colony is expanding faster than it can forage.
Pea family
Fabaceae · 28 plants
The family behind clover honey, alfalfa honey and acacia honey, and the one where flower architecture decides who gets to eat.
Honeysuckle family
Caprifoliaceae · 9 plants
Scabious for late summer, honeysuckle for moths and long-tongued bees, and one shrub that flowers through the coldest part of the year.
Heather family
Ericaceae · 9 plants
Acid-soil specialists that produce two of the most distinctive honeys in the world and flower when very little else does.
Buttercup family
Ranunculaceae · 7 plants
The winter and earliest-spring family. Mostly pollen rather than nectar, and that is exactly what an emerging queen needs.
Myrtle family
Myrtaceae · 11 plants
Eucalyptus, mānuka, pōhutukawa and jarrah. The family that produces most of the southern hemisphere's honey and almost none of Europe's.
Cabbage family
Brassicaceae · 6 plants
Oilseed rape at farm scale and a handful of genuinely good garden plants. The family that made setting honey the norm across northern Europe.
Borage family
Boraginaceae · 6 plants
Pound for pound the highest nectar producers in the catalogue. Borage refills within minutes of being emptied, which is why bees work it obsessively.
Carrot family
Apiaceae · 7 plants
Flat umbels of tiny shallow flowers — the most accessible nectar in any garden, and the family that feeds the insects nobody plants for.
Mallow family
Malvaceae · 6 plants
Lime trees above all — the heaviest single nectar flow available to a northern European colony, and one that lasts a fortnight.
Onion family
Amaryllidaceae · 5 plants
Alliums are among the best value in a bee garden: a dense sphere of accessible florets on a stem that takes up almost no ground space.
Buckthorn family
Rhamnaceae · 4 plants
Sidr honey comes from this family, and so does one of the best small native nectar shrubs in Europe — a hedgerow plant almost nobody plants deliberately.
Maple and horse chestnut family
Sapindaceae · 6 plants
Early spring trees producing nectar in the quantity a colony needs precisely when it is expanding fastest. Sycamore in particular is badly underrated.
Sapodilla family
Sapotaceae · 4 plants
Shea, argan, mahua and chiuri — tropical and subtropical trees behind honeys most of Europe has never seen, and behind some of the oldest honey-hunting traditions there are.
Plantain family
Plantaginaceae · 3 plants
Foxglove and hebe — one a bumblebee flower so specialised it is almost a diagram, the other a long-flowering shrub worked by everything.
Citrus family
Rutaceae · 4 plants
Orange and lemon blossom, and the honeys that smell of the flower rather than the fruit — which surprises almost everyone who tries them.
Protea family
Proteaceae · 3 plants
Banksia, macadamia and rewarewa — southern-hemisphere flowers built for birds, which bees exploit anyway.
Primrose family
Primulaceae · 3 plants
Early, low and modest. Primroses and cyclamen are not heavy producers, and in February that is not the point.
Asparagus family
Asparagaceae · 3 plants
Bluebells, grape hyacinth and squill — spring bulbs that flower under trees before the canopy closes, in ground nothing else is using.
Currant family
Grossulariaceae · 3 plants
Flowering currant, blackcurrant and gooseberry — March and April shrubs that feed emerging queens and then produce fruit.
Elder and viburnum family
Adoxaceae · 3 plants
Guelder rose and viburnum, and a shrub that flowers through winter. Pollen-rich and nectar-poor, which is a real distinction rather than a technicality.
Pine family
Pinaceae · 3 plants
Conifers produce no nectar at all and still yield some of Europe's most valuable honey. The mechanism is not pollination — it is aphids.
Cashew and mango family
Anacardiaceae · 4 plants
Mango, cashew and Brazilian pepper — tropical crop trees where the honey is a by-product of a pollination contract.
Palm family
Arecaceae · 4 plants
Palms are easy to overlook because their flowers are neither showy nor scented, and several of them are among the most dependable nectar sources in the warm world.
Ivy family
Araliaceae · 3 plants
A small family whose entire value rests on one thing: its members flower when almost nothing else does, at both ends of the world.
Oak and chestnut family
Fagaceae · 3 plants
One member of this family produces a famous honey and the other two produce none at all — and yet all three yield honey, by two completely different mechanisms.
Leatherwood family
Cunoniaceae · 3 plants
A southern-hemisphere family that supplies three of the most distinctive temperate rainforest honeys in the world, from forests with no northern equivalent.
Spurge family
Euphorbiaceae · 3 plants
Odd flowers, heavy nectar, and a family that includes both a major American honey crop and several plants that will burn your skin.