Foxglove
A specialist plant, and the clearest illustration on the site that 'good for bees' always means good for some bees. A foxglove's deep tubular flower is a private arrangement with long-tongued bumblebees: they climb inside, and almost nothing else can reach the nectar. It is also seriously toxic, which is worth stating plainly on a site that also discusses eating things.
Caution
All parts are seriously toxic to people, dogs, cats and livestock, containing cardiac glycosides that affect heart rhythm. Poisoning cases have occurred from the leaves being mistaken for comfrey and made into tea. Wear gloves when handling, wash hands afterwards, and think carefully before planting where small children graze. The nectar and pollen are toxic to some insects too — which is thought to be part of the plant's strategy for restricting its visitors to the bumblebees that pollinate it well.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- High
- Pollen
- Moderate
- As a honey crop
- Not a honey source
- Which bees, and why
- Worked almost exclusively by long-tongued bumblebees — the garden bumblebee and common carder bee particularly — which disappear entirely inside the flower to reach the nectar. The spotted markings in the throat are nectar guides, pointing the way in.
The corolla tube is far too deep for a honey bee's roughly 6 mm tongue. Honey bees occasionally take pollen from the anthers at the mouth but effectively never get the nectar. Short-tongued bumblebees sometimes bite through the base of the flower to rob it, taking the nectar without pollinating.
- Worth knowing
- High value to a narrow group. This is exactly the plant a 'bee friendly' score would misrepresent: excellent for long-tongued bumblebees, largely irrelevant to honey bees.
Flowering
- In flower
- June to July (northern hemisphere)
Flowers open from the bottom of the spike upwards over several weeks.
- When nectar flows
- Nectar sits at the very base of a corolla tube 3-4 cm deep, wholly inaccessible to short-tongued insects.
What it does to the honey
None. Foxglove does not contribute to honey in any meaningful quantity, and this record exists to make the pollination point rather than the honey one.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Partial shade to full sun, acid to neutral well-drained soil, happiest at a woodland edge.
- Size
- 1-2 m in flower.
- Native range
- Western and central Europe, on acid soils in woodland clearings and hedge banks.
- Suits
- Small gardens, Large gardens, Hedgerow, Meadow or wildflower area
- Biennial: it flowers in its second year and dies. Let it self-seed and you will have flowers every year from a single introduction.
- Scatter seed on the surface — it needs light to germinate and will not come up if buried.
- Excellent in the difficult dry shade under trees where little else flowers.
What it looks like
A biennial forming a rosette of soft grey-green leaves in its first year and a tall one-sided spike of drooping tubular flowers in its second — purple-pink, occasionally white, spotted inside the throat.
Sources
- Bumblebees: Behaviour, Ecology, and Conservation — Oxford University Press (2010) · Monograph
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this plant
- Nectar plants explainedNectar is a payment. Understanding what the plant is buying, and how it controls the price, explains most of what flowers do and why some are useless to some bees.
- How bees find flowersBees see ultraviolet, cannot see red, detect a flower's electric field and learn scent faster than almost any other insect. Flowers, for their part, have spent a hundred million years advertising to them.
- How pollination worksPlants cannot move, so they pay something that can. Pollination is a transaction, and understanding it as one explains almost everything about flower shape.
- 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.
- Visiting a flower is not the same as pollinating itA bee on a flower may be pollinating it, robbing it, or doing nothing for it at all. The distinction is why 'attracts bees' on a plant label tells you almost nothing, and why visit counts are a poor measure of pollination.
- Plants for bumblebeesLong tongues, big bodies, cold tolerance and an annual colony that has to build from a single queen. Bumblebees can use flowers honey bees cannot reach, and they need forage at both ends of the year when honey bees are indoors.
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?