HoneyHQ

Rose family plants for bees

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.

Rosaceae · 24 plants in the catalogue · 23 bee relationships

Why this family matters

Rosaceae flowers are open, five-petalled and shallow, with nectar exposed at the base of a ring of stamens — the most accessible flower shape there is. That openness is why the family is worked by everything from honey bees to hoverflies, and it is why fruit growers depend on wild bees as much as on hives. The family's real significance, though, is timing: apple, cherry, plum, blackthorn, hawthorn and almond all flower in a compressed spring window, in the quantity only a tree can produce, precisely when a colony's brood demand is climbing steeply.

When it flowers

A spring family above all. Almond and apricot in February, blackthorn, plum and cherry in March, apple and crab apple in April, hawthorn, rowan, quince and cotoneaster in May and June. Bramble and raspberry then extend the family well into summer, and bramble in particular is among the most valuable hedgerow sources in Britain.

Which bees it serves

Mason bees are the family's most efficient pollinators — a single Osmia visits and contacts far more flowers per hour than a honey bee, and orchards that provide nesting tubes see it in the fruit set. Honey bees work the same blossom in numbers and produce the fruit-blossom honeys. Solitary mining bees emerge to coincide with this flowering almost exactly.

Worth knowing before you plant it

Fruit blossom is short. A cold or wet week during apple flowering removes the forage entirely, which is why an orchard-heavy plan needs something else flowering either side of it.

Rose 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
January2YesYes
February4YesYes
March8YesYes
April9YesYes
May14YesYes
June12YesYes
July5YesYes
August4YesYes
September3YesYes
October1YesYes
November2YesYes
December2YesYes

Check these against your region before planting

2 plants in this group carry an invasiveness or legal restriction note somewhere in the world: Bramble, Cotoneaster. 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

HoneyHQ saves your cookie choice on this device. Optional analytics run only if you accept — set a preference now, or change it later on the cookies page.