HoneyHQ

Daisy family plants for bees

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.

Asteraceae · 32 plants in the catalogue · 34 bee relationships

Why this family matters

An Asteraceae flower head is a composite: what reads as a single daisy is a dense disc of tiny individual florets, each with its own nectary, surrounded by ray florets that function as advertising. For a bee this is an unusually efficient foraging surface — it can walk across a landing platform working floret after floret without the energetic cost of flying between flowers. The nectar sits shallow in most of them, which makes the family accessible to short-tongued bees, hoverflies and beetles as well as to long-tongued specialists. It is also the family that dominates late summer and early autumn in temperate gardens, which is when a colony most needs to build stores.

When it flowers

Overwhelmingly a July-to-October family in the northern temperate garden, with goldenrod, Michaelmas daisies, heleniums and rudbeckias covering exactly the stretch when spring and midsummer forage has finished. Coltsfoot and dandelion are the outliers, and dandelion in particular is one of the most important early sources there is despite being treated as a weed.

Which bees it serves

Serves the broadest range of bee species of any family in the catalogue, because shallow florets exclude nobody. Honey bees work it heavily for both nectar and pollen; several solitary bee genera are Asteraceae specialists and will visit almost nothing else, which is why removing dandelions and ragwort from a landscape costs more than it looks like it should.

Worth knowing before you plant it

Double-flowered cultivars — pompom dahlias, double asters, many bedding chrysanthemums — have had their nectaries bred into extra petals and offer little or nothing. The flower that looks most generous is frequently the emptiest, and this family is where that trap is commonest.

Daisy family plants in the catalogue

What this group covers

12 of 12 months have something in flower. Nectar and pollen are counted separately and a month counts only where at least one plant offers that resource at moderate value or better — a plant in flower is not the same as a plant worth visiting.

Flowering, nectar and pollen coverage by month for this group
MonthIn flowerNectarPollen
January1YesYes
February2YesYes
March3YesYes
April3YesYes
May5YesYes
June12YesYes
July26YesYes
August29YesYes
September29YesYes
October16YesYes
November4YesYes
December2YesYes

Check these against your region before planting

7 plants in this group carry an invasiveness or legal restriction note somewhere in the world: Goldenrod, Knapweed, Thistle, Oxeye daisy, Yellow starthistle, Common ragwort, Spanish needle. HoneyHQ does not know where you are and will not guess, so it flags rather than filters.

Bees these plants are recorded with

Taken from the relationships on each plant record. These are the well-attested associations rather than an exhaustive list of visitors, so treat the number as a floor.

Honeys from these plants

Other families

Plan with these

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