What bees do in summer
Maximum population and maximum output, with the whole year's stores made in a few weeks of good weather.
Bees and plants in summer
Summer is when honey is actually made, and when the colony is largest. It also contains the June gap — a real dip between the spring blossom and the mid-summer flow that catches out more beekeepers than the winter does.
June to August · 191 plants in flower · 102 bees on the wing
The best summer plants for bees
Most gardens are at their best in June and empty by late August. The plants worth adding are the ones that flower after the first flush is over.
The honey bee colony
The colony reaches its peak of 50,000 to 60,000 bees and turns the landscape's nectar into stores. A summer worker lives about six weeks and works herself to death: the wing wear is literal. Foraging is organised through the waggle dance, which communicates direction and distance well enough that a colony concentrates its effort on the best available source and abandons it when it stops yielding. The major honey flows — lime, clover, bramble, heather — all fall in this window, and a colony makes essentially its whole surplus during them.
Bumblebees
The colony that a queen founded alone in March is now at full size, which for most species means a few dozen to a few hundred workers rather than tens of thousands. Late summer is the reproductive phase: the colony switches from producing workers to producing new queens and males, and once it does, the old colony is finished. Bumblebees are also the bees flying in poor weather — they thermoregulate well enough to work at temperatures that keep honey bees indoors, which is why they matter disproportionately in a cold wet summer.
Solitary bees
The summer solitary species are a different set from the spring ones. Leafcutter bees are cutting neat semicircles from rose and lilac leaves to line their cells; mason bees have finished; wool carder bees are scraping hairs from lamb's ear and defending patches of it aggressively. Many are specialists on summer families — the daisy family above all — and a garden of spring-flowering plants supports none of them.
What actually helps in summer
Water, which is genuinely limiting in hot weather — a shallow dish with stones in it does more good in August than another plant would. Then late-summer forage: knapweed, scabious, marjoram, agastache, heather. And leaving hollow stems and dead wood alone, because that is where this season's cavity nesters are provisioning.
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 | 7 | Yes | Yes |
| February | 7 | Yes | Yes |
| March | 12 | Yes | Yes |
| April | 31 | Yes | Yes |
| May | 78 | Yes | Yes |
| June | 138 | Yes | Yes |
| July | 148 | Yes | Yes |
| August | 138 | Yes | Yes |
| September | 113 | Yes | Yes |
| October | 50 | Yes | Yes |
| November | 17 | Yes | Yes |
| December | 8 | Yes | Yes |
What to plant for summer
Honeys harvested in summer
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.
- Clover honeyWarm, mild and rounded — sweet with a faint cinnamon-and-hay note underneath. The taste most English-speaking readers picture when they read the word honey.
- Lavender honeyOvertly perfumed — lavender flower, warm hay and a soft fruity sweetness underneath. Aromatic in a way most honeys are not.
- Rapeseed honeyVery sweet, very mild, faintly cabbage-like when fresh and cleanly bland once set. Texture is what it has instead of flavour.
- Fireweed honeyVery delicate, buttery and faintly tea-like, with a clean finish and almost no aftertaste. A honey that rewards attention and disappears if you are not paying any.
- Borage honeyVery light and very clean, with a faint cucumber-fresh note that fades with age. Sweetness without commentary.
- Sage honeyMild, clean and slightly herbal, with a heavy silky body that is more of the experience than the flavour is.
- Raspberry honeyDelicate and lightly fruity with a clean bright acidity — one of the few honeys where a taster unprompted names the right fruit.
- Sulla honeyVery delicate and clean, with a soft almond-and-fresh-grass note and almost no aftertaste.
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?