Red clover
The plant that best explains why tongue length matters. Red clover produces abundant nectar in a corolla tube most honey bees cannot reach, so a field of it in full flower can be humming with bumblebees and almost empty of honey bees. It is one of the most important bumblebee plants in the temperate world, and its decline as a farm crop is directly implicated in the decline of Britain's long-tongued bumblebees.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- Very high
- Pollen
- High
- As a honey crop
- Feeds the colony but rarely yields a surplus
- Which bees, and why
- Long-tongued bumblebees — the garden bumblebee, the common carder and, historically, the great yellow — work it properly and depend on it. Honey bees have tongues of roughly 6 mm against a 9-10 mm corolla and generally cannot reach the nectar, so they largely ignore it or rob holes made by short-tongued bumblebees. This is why almost all commercial clover honey is white clover, whose florets are shallow enough.
A deep corolla that functions as a filter. Red clover is the standard example of why 'good for bees' is meaningless without saying which bees.
- Worth knowing
- Top-rated nectar that most of the bees people plant for cannot reach. This record exists largely to make that distinction concrete.
Flowering
- In flower
- May to September (northern hemisphere)
A long window if uncut. Red clover cut for silage in May yields nothing; left for hay or seed it flowers all summer and regrows to flower again.
- When nectar flows
- Copious nectar held at the base of a corolla tube roughly 9-10 mm deep. That depth is the entire story of the plant's ecology.
- Year-to-year variation
- Reliable as forage where it is left to flower. Essentially never a honey crop from honey bees, for reasons of anatomy rather than abundance.
What it does to the honey
Where honey bees do get at it — usually through robbed holes or in a season of exceptional nectar pressure — red clover contributes a deeper, spicier note than white clover. There is no meaningful commercial red clover honey.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Sun, any reasonable soil. It fixes nitrogen and improves poor ground.
- Size
- 20-60 cm.
- Native range
- Europe, western Asia and northwest Africa; introduced worldwide as a forage crop.
- Suits
- Meadow or wildflower area, Large gardens, Farm scale
- Include it in any meadow or green-manure mix specifically for long-tongued bumblebees, which have fewer alternatives than short-tongued species.
- The critical management decision is the cutting date. Delaying one cut until after flowering converts a crop into forage at no cost.
- Its collapse as a farm crop after nitrogen fertiliser arrived is one of the clearest documented drivers of long-tongued bumblebee decline in Britain.
What it looks like
A short-lived perennial legume with trifoliate leaves marked with a pale chevron, and dense rounded heads of small pink-purple pea flowers.
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.
- The threats facing beesBee decline is not one problem with one cause. It is a set of interacting pressures whose relative weight differs between managed honey bees and wild species — and confusing the two produces bad solutions.
- Making a wildflower area for beesA meadow is made by reducing fertility and weakening grass, not by scattering seed on a lawn. The single most useful plant in the process is a parasite.
- Why botanical family is the most useful thing to know about a bee plantCorolla depth, floret arrangement and whether nectar is exposed are inherited traits. Learn a family and you can predict a plant nobody has catalogued.
- 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?