Tulsi

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

Moderate

As a honey crop

Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally

Which bees, and why

Worked heavily by the Asian honey bee and by the dwarf honey bee, both of which are the common managed and wild species across its range. The shallow lipped flower excludes nothing.

Worth knowing

A dependable post-monsoon source in Indian apiaries, and one of the few whose cultivated area is driven by religious and medicinal use rather than by agriculture.

Flowering

In flower

September to February (northern hemisphere)

Cool-season flowering across much of India, which places it usefully after the monsoon.

When nectar flows

Steady over a long season rather than a short heavy flow, and the plant continues to secrete in warm dry conditions.

What it does to the honey

Carries the plant's eugenol and methyl-eugenol aroma through into the honey as a clove-like, faintly camphorous herbal note over light caramel.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, warmth and moderate moisture. Frost-tender and grown as an annual outside the tropics.

Size

0.3-1 m.

Native range

The Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, cultivated throughout and naturalised in many tropical regions.

Suits

Containers and window boxes, Small gardens

• Easily grown from seed in a warm season and useful in a container in a temperate summer.
• Pinch out early growth for bushiness, then let it flower — the flowering is the point for bees.

What it looks like

A soft-wooded aromatic subshrub with toothed green or purple leaves and slender terminal spikes of small pale lilac flowers arranged in whorls.