How to Support Your Local Bees

For a planting scheme that will support bee populations and have your garden buzzing, our top two recommendations are 1) grow a variety of plants and 2) choose flowers for every season. There are over 270 different bee species in the UK (source: Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland) and they are all different. We first saw hairy-footed flower bees in our garden when we started growing bugloss (it was an Anchusa azurea plant) whereas carder bees absolutely love our perennial sunflowers, early bumblebees like the clary sage and scabious, buff/white-tailed bumblebees get hooked on our globe thistles, red-tailed bumblebees love the clover in our lawn, honeybees can’t get enough of our thyme when it is flowering, and so on, and so on. No single plant type or colour is best for every bee species so growing a mix of plants is key! We offer over one hundred plant varieties that are attractive to bees and suited to our local soils (or can be planted in a pot), so you can choose the colour, size and style that you want for your garden – check our bee-friendly plants out here.

That said, there are a few superstar plants that merit a special mention…

Bees love plants with snapdragon-like flowers that provide a landing platform where the bee can hold on, and once the bee has alighted then the flower opens and the nectar is accessible. These plants include snapdragons themselves and toadflaxes that, importantly, also have a really long flowering season.

Herbs are great for pollinators. Our thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano, chives and garlic chives are all popular with the local bees and, importantly, rosemary also flowers early in the year.

Scabious, verbenas and buddlejas are famous for attracting butterflies but they are loved by bees too. Buddlejas and Verbena bonariensis are easy to grow on our local soils but many scabious species prefer a well-drained soil so we have tested a large number of varieties to select those that do well here.

Tubular flowers are also popular with bees and we recommend foxgloves, fuchsias and honeywort, which is always buzzing in our garden.

Globe thistles and perennial sunflowers produce generous quantities of nectar, feeding large numbers of bees all day long.

Bees can be active in winter, especially on a sunny day and even more so now that our winters are getting milder, so it is important that nectar is available all year round. There are hundreds of plants you can choose for flowers from spring through to autumn, but in winter the list is much smaller and we recommend growing any winter-flowering varieties you can. Find out more on our year-round flowering blog.

Our Mahonia shrubs start flowering in January and are buzzing with bees on a sunny winter’s day. For winter nectar, we also recommend crocuses, heather, hellebores, primroses and rosemary.

Habitats are important for bees too, including water, and we will be adding more info to this blog soon, together with details of some of the bee species to look out for in your own garden!