Ivy
The last major nectar source of the year in temperate Europe, and by some distance the most important. Ivy flowers in autumn when almost nothing else does, producing enormous quantities of nectar and pollen at exactly the moment colonies need to build winter stores and bumblebee queens need to fatten before hibernation. It has a poor reputation among gardeners that it does not deserve.
Where not to plant it
Invasive in parts of North America, Australia and New Zealand, where it smothers native vegetation and is prohibited or discouraged in several jurisdictions. Excellent forage in its native Europe; a genuine problem elsewhere.
Caution
Berries are toxic to people if eaten, and the sap causes contact dermatitis in some. Birds eat the berries safely and depend on them in late winter.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- Very 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, late bumblebees, hoverflies, wasps and butterflies including red admirals. It also supports its own dedicated specialist — the ivy bee, Colletes hederae, a ground-nesting solitary bee that emerges in September specifically for this flowering and has expanded its range northwards rapidly in recent decades.
Nectar is entirely exposed, making ivy accessible to the widest possible range of insects — including many that cannot feed from tubular flowers at all.
- Worth knowing
- One of the very few plants that is top-rated for both nectar and pollen, and it delivers them when the year's other options have finished. For overwintering insects this is decisive.
Flowering
- In flower
- September to November (northern hemisphere)
Timing is what makes it exceptional. Nothing else of comparable scale flowers this late in the temperate year.
- When nectar flows
- Nectar is fully exposed on open shallow discs rather than hidden in a tube, so it is accessible to insects with very short mouthparts — wasps, flies and beetles as well as bees. Warm October days produce a heavy flow.
What it does to the honey
Ivy honey is strong, slightly bitter, and granulates extremely fast to a hard white set — so fast that it commonly sets solid in the comb before it can be extracted, which is why it is rarely sold. Most of it stays in the hive as winter stores, which is arguably where it belongs.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Extremely tolerant — deep shade to full sun, most soils, drought once established.
- Size
- Climbing to 20 m or more.
- Native range
- Europe and western Asia.
- Suits
- Walls and fences, Small gardens, Large gardens, Hedgerow
- Maintenance, and the bit that matters
- The most valuable ivy in a garden is the ivy nobody has cut. If it must be managed, cut some and leave the top growth alone.
- Only mature growth flowers. Ivy clipped annually stays permanently juvenile and never produces a single flower, which is how a wall covered in ivy can be worth nothing to bees.
- Let it reach the top of a wall or fence and bush out. That bushy growth at the top is the part that matters.
- It does not kill healthy trees. Ivy is a self-supporting climber, not a parasite; it takes no nutrients from the tree and the main real risk is added wind resistance on an already failing one.
What it looks like
An evergreen climber with two distinct forms: juvenile growth has the familiar lobed leaves and climbs by aerial roots, while mature flowering growth has unlobed diamond-shaped leaves and stands out as bushy shrubby growth at the top of a wall or tree. Only the mature form flowers, in globular greenish-yellow umbels.
Sources
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this plant
- Which flowers make honeyBeing good for bees and producing a honey crop are different things. A honey crop needs a plant that flowers in enormous quantity, in one place, at one time — which most good bee plants do not.
- How honey bees survive winterHoney bees do not hibernate. They form a cluster, shiver to generate heat, eat their stores and move slowly through the comb — and most colony losses happen in this period.
- How to actually help beesRanked by how much difference it makes, from the things that genuinely work down to the things that are mostly gestures. The first item on the list is not planting flowers.
- 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.
- Winter forage: plants that flower for bees from November to MarchBees fly on mild winter days and most gardens offer them nothing. Filling the November-to-March gap is the single highest-value planting decision a temperate garden can make, and it takes about six plants.
- Plants that attract honey bees specificallyHoney bees have short tongues and work in large numbers, which means they want different plants from bumblebees. Half the flowers sold as bee-friendly are out of their reach entirely.
- The best plants for beesA shortlist chosen on three criteria: how much nectar and pollen the plant produces, how accessible it is to different bees, and when it flowers. Season coverage matters more than any individual plant.
- Bee plants through the yearThe gaps matter more than the peaks. Almost every garden has plenty in June and nothing in February, and it is the empty months that limit what a garden can support.
- Autumn plants for beesAutumn forage decides how well colonies enter winter. It is also when one plant does more work than everything else combined, and most people regard it as a nuisance.
- Bee plants for a small gardenA small garden cannot do everything, so it should do the things large gardens usually skip: the winter and early spring gaps, and nesting habitat. Both take almost no space.
- A bee-friendly garden in Britain and IrelandAround 270 bee species, one honey bee among them, and a climate that gives you flowering months at both ends of the year that most of the world does not get. The British gaps are February and late June, and both are fixable.
- Specialist bees and the plants they cannot do withoutA large minority of bee species collect pollen from one plant genus and will starve rather than switch. For them a flowery garden is not forage — it is scenery around the one thing they need.
- Plants for solitary beesNine bee species in ten are solitary. They are small, short-tongued, short-lived and often tied to particular plants — which makes open shallow flowers, a long season and untidy ground more useful to them than a border of showy perennials.
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?