Viper's bugloss
One of the highest nectar-yielding wild plants in Europe, and a beekeeper's plant more than a gardener's. Viper's bugloss grows on chalk, shingle, waste ground and road verges, and secretes nectar so freely and so continuously through the day that bees work the same flowers repeatedly. Where it occurs at scale — famously in parts of New Zealand, where it is a naturalised weed — it produces a genuine honey crop.
Where not to plant it
A declared or listed weed in parts of Australia, New Zealand and North America, where it colonises rangeland. It also contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids that make it a genuine hazard to grazing livestock, particularly horses, which is the basis for most of those listings.
Caution
Contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids and is toxic to horses and cattle if grazed in quantity. Not a plant for a paddock margin.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- Very high
- Pollen
- High
- As a honey crop
- Minor honey crop — a surplus only locally or occasionally
- Which bees, and why
- Worked continuously and by a very wide range of bees. It supports several scarce solitary bee specialists in Britain, and the long protruding stamens give an easy foothold. A patch in flower is one of the most conspicuously busy things in a summer landscape.
A funnel-shaped flower with the nectar deep enough to favour longer-tongued bees, though honey bees work it perfectly well. The shape is intermediate rather than exclusive.
- Worth knowing
- Among the most productive nectar plants in the European flora per flower, and a good pollen source alongside it. In New Zealand, naturalised echium is a significant commercial honey source under the name blue borage.
Flowering
- In flower
- June to September (northern hemisphere)
A long flowering season for a wild plant, with flowers opening in succession up the spike over many weeks.
- When nectar flows
- Exceptional and continuous secretion — echium refills quickly and keeps producing through the afternoon, unlike the many plants that yield only in the morning. It also performs well in hot dry conditions that suppress other sources.
- Year-to-year variation
- Highly dependable where it grows. The limitation is abundance rather than reliability: it needs open disturbed calcareous ground, which is exactly the habitat modern land use removes.
What it does to the honey
Where a surplus is taken, echium honey is pale, thick and mild with a clean floral character. New Zealand blue borage honey is the best-known example and is sold as a light table honey.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Full sun, poor free-draining and preferably calcareous soil. It hates rich damp ground and rots in it.
- Size
- 30-90 cm.
- Native range
- Europe and western Asia. Naturalised widely in North America, Australia and New Zealand, where it is often regarded as a weed.
- Suits
- Meadow or wildflower area, Large gardens, Small gardens
- Biennial: sow one year, flower the next. Sow two years running and the succession looks after itself thereafter.
- Self-seeds freely on the poor open ground it likes, and barely at all on rich cultivated soil.
- Bristly enough to be uncomfortable to handle — wear gloves when weeding around it.
What it looks like
A bristly biennial forming a rosette in the first year and a branched spike in the second, carrying funnel-shaped flowers that open pink and turn brilliant blue, with long red protruding stamens.
Sources
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
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.
- How bees find flowersBees see ultraviolet, cannot see red, detect a flower's electric field and learn scent faster than almost any other insect. Flowers, for their part, have spent a hundred million years advertising to them.
- The best plants for beesA shortlist chosen on three criteria: how much nectar and pollen the plant produces, how accessible it is to different bees, and when it flowers. Season coverage matters more than any individual plant.
- The best flowers for beesHerbaceous flowers rather than trees and shrubs, chosen for output and length of season. Most of them are things you can grow in a border or a container.
- Summer plants for beesSummer looks abundant and contains a real gap. The weeks between the spring blossom finishing and high summer starting are thinner than most gardens realise, and colonies are at peak population when it happens.
- 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?