Snowdrop

Value to bees

Nectar

Low

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Not a honey source

Which bees, and why

Worked by honey bees on mild winter days — bees returning with the pale grey-white snowdrop pollen are a familiar sight to beekeepers checking hives in February. Early bumblebee queens, increasingly active in winter in mild urban areas, use them too.

Nodding flowers with the nectar at the top of a hanging bell, so a bee has to work upward into it. Short-tongued bees manage, but it is not effortless forage.

Worth knowing

Rated low for nectar and it matters anyway, which is the clearest case on the site for why timing belongs alongside quantity. A moderate pollen source in February is worth more to a colony than a high one in July.

Flowering

In flower

January to March (northern hemisphere)

January and February in most of lowland Britain and western Europe, later at altitude and further north. Individual clumps flower for several weeks.

When nectar flows

Nectar is produced in small quantities and the flowers only open properly above roughly 10 °C, which conveniently matches the temperature at which a honey bee will fly at all.

Year-to-year variation

Never a crop, and never intended as one. What it provides is the possibility of forage on a warm winter day.

Growing it

Conditions

Part shade, moist humus-rich soil that does not dry out in summer. Happiest under deciduous trees and shrubs, flowering before the canopy closes.

Size

10-20 cm.

Native range

Continental Europe from the Pyrenees to Ukraine. Long naturalised in Britain, where it is almost certainly an ancient introduction rather than a native.

Suits

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

• Plant in the green — as growing plants just after flowering — rather than as dry bulbs, which establish poorly.
• Clumps congest over time and flower less. Lift and divide every three or four years immediately after flowering.
• Naturalises readily in grass and under shrubs, and a large drift is the work of leaving it alone for a decade.

What it looks like

A small bulb with two or three strap-shaped grey-green leaves and a single nodding white flower with three long outer segments and three short inner ones marked with a green notch.