What bees do in spring
Three completely different strategies unfold at once — a colony scaling up, a queen starting from nothing, and a solitary female with six weeks to live.
Bees and plants in spring
Spring is not the season of plenty people assume. It is the season in which demand rises faster than supply, and most colony failures happen here rather than in the cold.
March to May · 148 plants in flower · 95 bees on the wing
The best spring plants for bees
The plants that flower between March and May are feeding colony expansion and solitary emergence at once. Quantity matters less here than presence.
The honey bee colony
The colony begins rearing brood in late winter and accelerates hard through March and April, driven by day length rather than by temperature. Population can rise from perhaps 10,000 bees to 50,000 in a few weeks, and every one of those larvae needs pollen — protein — as well as nectar. This is the point at which stores run out: the classic spring starvation happens in April, not January, because the colony is consuming faster than it can collect and a week of cold rain removes foraging entirely. It is also swarming season. A colony that has filled its space raises queen cells and roughly half of it leaves with the old queen, which is reproduction at the colony level rather than a malfunction.
Bumblebees
A bumblebee queen emerges alone from hibernation, having spent the winter underground with no colony and no stores. She must find nectar to fuel herself and pollen to provision the first brood cells, then incubate them with her own body heat while continuing to forage. Everything depends on her: there are no workers until the first brood matures, and a cold fortnight with nothing in flower kills the whole prospective colony. This is why February and March forage matters out of all proportion to its quantity — a queen needs a little, daily, at a time when there is almost nothing.
Solitary bees
The majority of bee species are solitary, and for most of them spring is the entire adult life. A female mining bee emerges, mates, digs or finds a nest, and spends perhaps six weeks provisioning cells with pollen before dying — the next generation stays underground until the following spring. Several are specialists tied to a single plant family, so their emergence is synchronised with a particular flowering, and a mismatch caused by a warm February or a late frost has no fallback.
What actually helps in spring
Early forage, in that order of priority: something in flower in March, then nesting sites, then everything else. Willow, blackthorn, flowering currant, dandelion and the spring bulbs are worth more than any amount of June planting. Leave dandelions alone until May. And leave patches of bare, sunny, undisturbed soil, because that is where seventy per cent of bee species nest and no flower substitutes for it.
What this group covers
12 of 12 months have something in flower. Nectar and pollen are counted separately and a month counts only where at least one plant offers that resource at moderate value or better — a plant in flower is not the same as a plant worth visiting.
| Month | In flower | Nectar | Pollen |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 30 | Yes | Yes |
| February | 44 | Yes | Yes |
| March | 69 | Yes | Yes |
| April | 84 | Yes | Yes |
| May | 109 | Yes | Yes |
| June | 78 | Yes | Yes |
| July | 48 | Yes | Yes |
| August | 34 | Yes | Yes |
| September | 24 | Yes | Yes |
| October | 15 | Yes | Yes |
| November | 12 | Yes | Yes |
| December | 18 | Yes | Yes |
What to plant for spring
Honeys harvested in spring
Northern-hemisphere harvest windows from the honey records. A harvest window is when a flow is taken off, which is later than the flowering that produced it.
- Acacia honeyClean, light and sweet with almost nothing in the way. The honey to reach for when you want sweetness without a flavour opinion.
- Rosemary honeyDelicate and softly aromatic — floral first, with a thin thread of resin behind it that tells you where it came from.
- Orange blossom honeyUnmistakably floral and citrus-scented — orange blossom in the glass, with the fruit itself somewhere behind it.
- Rapeseed honeyVery sweet, very mild, faintly cabbage-like when fresh and cleanly bland once set. Texture is what it has instead of flavour.
- Tupelo honeyButtery and clean with a pear-and-green-apple lift, and a long soft finish that never turns cloying.
- Meadowfoam honeyToasted marshmallow and vanilla, unmistakably. The one honey most people identify blind on the first spoonful, because it tastes like something they already know.
- Sage honeyMild, clean and slightly herbal, with a heavy silky body that is more of the experience than the flavour is.
- Sulla honeyVery delicate and clean, with a soft almond-and-fresh-grass note and almost no aftertaste.
- Sainfoin honeyDelicate and softly floral with a distinct rose-and-hay note, and a thickness that gives it more presence than its flavour alone would.
The rest of the year
Months here are northern-hemisphere temperate. Southern-hemisphere readers should shift by roughly six months — but that shift is an approximation rather than a translation, because day length, rainfall pattern and the local flora do not shift with it. Records that genuinely span both hemispheres say so.
Plan the season
- Seasonal bee planner
It is this season and I want to do this — what should I plant?
- 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?