Wild carrot
A lacy white umbel of a plant on dry grassland and verges, and one of the most important flower shapes in the whole bee garden. Umbellifers hold hundreds of tiny completely open flowers on a flat plate, which makes them the primary forage for the small bees, hoverflies and parasitic wasps that cannot use anything tubular — the insects that most 'bee-friendly' planting fails entirely.
Caution
Superficially similar to hemlock and hemlock water-dropwort, both of which are lethally poisonous. Wild carrot has hairy stems and a carrot smell; hemlock has smooth purple-blotched stems. Never forage umbellifers without certain identification.
Value to bees
- Nectar
- Moderate
- Pollen
- High
- As a honey crop
- Feeds the colony but rarely yields a surplus
- Which bees, and why
- An enormous visitor list dominated by small solitary bees, hoverflies, soldier beetles, parasitic wasps and flies. Umbellifers are the single most important flower shape for the beneficial insects that control aphids, which makes them useful in a vegetable garden well beyond their pollination role.
Tiny fully open flowers with completely exposed nectar. Nothing is excluded.
- Worth knowing
- Moderate nectar and good pollen, in the most accessible form available — its value is the breadth of the visitor list rather than the volume.
Flowering
- In flower
- June to September (northern hemisphere)
A long window through high summer, with successive umbels opening over weeks.
- When nectar flows
- Small quantities per floret and a very large number of florets, entirely exposed and available to anything that can land.
- Year-to-year variation
- Reliable on poor dry ground. Not a crop.
Growing it
- Conditions
- Full sun, poor dry soil, and disturbed ground. It thrives where the soil is thin.
- Size
- 30-100 cm.
- Native range
- Europe, North Africa and southwest Asia, naturalised worldwide.
- Suits
- Meadow or wildflower area, Large gardens, Small gardens
- Biennial: sow two years running and it self-perpetuates.
- The cultivated carrot is the same species. Letting a few carrots bolt does exactly the same job in a vegetable garden.
- Other umbellifers — fennel, angelica, hogweed, ammi — do the same work, and a garden should have at least one.
What it looks like
A flat or slightly domed white umbel of many tiny flowers, usually with a single dark red flower at the centre, on a hairy branching stem, curling inwards into a bird's-nest shape as the seed sets.
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
- Plants that attract honey bees specificallyHoney bees have short tongues and work in large numbers, which means they want different plants from bumblebees. Half the flowers sold as bee-friendly are out of their reach entirely.
- 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.
- Plants for solitary beesNine bee species in ten are solitary. They are small, short-tongued, short-lived and often tied to particular plants — which makes open shallow flowers, a long season and untidy ground more useful to them than a border of showy perennials.
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?