Common milkweed

Value to bees

Nectar

Very high

Pollen

Low

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

The pollinia clip onto a leg or tongue as the insect slips into one of the flower's five slots, and are carried whole to the next flower. Small bees are sometimes trapped and die in the flower, which is a genuine and visible cost of the arrangement.

The mechanism favours large strong insects. A honey bee can usually pull free; a smaller bee sometimes cannot.

Worth knowing

A heavy nectar source and a poor pollen one, because the pollen is not loose — it is bound into paired pollinia that attach mechanically to a visitor.

Flowering

In flower

June to August (northern hemisphere)

Peak midsummer, overlapping the American clover flow and outlasting it in dry years.

When nectar flows

Copious and heavily perfumed. Milkweed nectar is among the most concentrated available to North American bees and the scent carries a long way.

What it does to the honey

Gives a pale, clear honey with an unusually perfumed floral aroma and a clean sweetness, considered a delicacy where it can be produced in quantity.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun on almost any soil, including dry poor ground and roadside verges.

Size

1-2 m, spreading by rhizome.

Native range

Eastern and central North America, from Canada to the southern United States.

Suits

Meadow or wildflower area, Large gardens, Farm scale

• Spreads vigorously by rhizome and is difficult to remove once established. Give it space it can have.
• It is the essential larval plant for monarch butterflies, which is reason enough to plant it in its native range.

What it looks like

Stout unbranched stems to two metres with large opposite leaves exuding milky latex when broken, and dense rounded umbels of dusky pink-purple flowers with a powerful sweet scent.