Mint

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Feeds the colony but rarely yields a surplus

Which bees, and why

Unusually democratic forage. The florets are tiny and shallow with fully accessible nectar, so short-tongued bees, hoverflies, wasps and butterflies use it as readily as long-tongued bumblebees — a flowering mint patch often has half a dozen insect groups on it at once.

Very short corolla with exposed nectar, which is why the visitor list is so long. This is about as accessible as forage gets in the mint family.

Worth knowing

Good nectar at a genuinely useful point in the season. Its value is timing and reliability rather than volume.

Flowering

In flower

July to September (northern hemisphere)

Right in the late-summer gap, after the lime and bramble have finished and before the ivy starts.

When nectar flows

Secretes freely in warm weather. Water mint (Mentha aquatica) is the most productive of the group and grows in damp ground where little else forage-worthy will.

Year-to-year variation

Reliable in the garden. Never a honey crop at any realistic scale.

What it does to the honey

Where mint contributes to a multifloral honey it adds a faint cool herbal note. There is no commercial mint honey, and the menthol most people would expect does not carry into nectar.

Growing it

Conditions

Sun to part shade, moist soil. Water mint wants genuinely wet ground and pond margins.

Size

30-90 cm, spreading indefinitely.

Native range

Europe, Asia and Africa, naturalised worldwide.

Suits

Containers and window boxes, Small gardens, Large gardens, Hedgerow

• Grow it in a pot, or in a bucket sunk in the ground. Mint spreads by runner and will take a border.
• Let some of it flower. Pick leaves from part of the clump and leave the rest alone — this is the single change that turns a mint patch into a bee plant.
• Water mint is the best of the group for bees and the easiest to place, in a boggy corner or beside a pond where nothing else thrives.

What it looks like

Square-stemmed aromatic perennials spreading vigorously by runner, with paired toothed leaves and dense terminal spikes or whorls of small lilac, pink or white flowers.