Six Flowers for Bees

Our garden is quite small, but we fit in flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruit, all mixed in together, we don't have separate areas for each. I didn't originally plan the garden to attract wildlife it just seems to have evolved that way! Probably because myself and the children love watching and listening to the wildlife, we have a variety, including hedgehogs, birds, insects and of course lovely bees. Growing flowers that attract bees, both helps the bees that are in decline, and helps with the pollination of our produce. So I thought I would share six flowers in our garden that the bees seem to love.

Borage

Borage is a beautiful plant, an annual, with delicate blue flowers, easy to grow, and a prolific self seeder. It's considered to be a herb, and has a cucumber smell and taste. If you are planning on drinking Pimms this summer, you need your own borage garnish, and the bees will thank you for growing it too. I've grown it from seed once, and now I just let it self seed. If the self seeded plants don't grow quite where I want them, I transplant to other areas of the garden once they have about four leaves.  Borage is beautiful, easy to grow, and the bees absolutely love it.

Bee on Borage Flower

Toadflax

Now this plant I love, but it is a bit controversial as some people think of it as a weed, it  grows naturally on waste lands, and self seeds prolifically. I personally don't find this a problem, I just pull up what I don't want, or transplant elsewhere, or you could make sure you dead head before it seeds. The positives out way the negatives for me. It's a perennial and can grow quite big once established, up to 1metre tall and it has lovely silvery foliage. Mine is a pink toadflax, which has delicate light pink flowers, and you can also get purple toadflax. I've recently noticed some deep purple toadflax growing nearby, which I would really like to have growing in the garden too. Again the bees love this plant, mine is always covered in bees, it's the most popular plant in my garden with the bees at the minute, and often there are a variety of different bees on the plant at any one time.

Toadflax with Bee

Sage

A perennial herb, so a plant that's useful, and attractive to bees. Great for those that cook, you can use the leaves fresh, or cut and dry ready for winter use, when the plant naturally dies back. There are some lovely variegated varieties too, we have a couple of different types, and I love their slightly furry leaves that add texture to garden beds. Plus they have spikes of blue flowers that are attractive to the bees. For some reason I have one plant that seems to flower earlier than the others, and it's always one of the first plants available for the bees in the spring, which I'm sure they're thankful for.

Bee on a Sage Flower

Antirrhinum (Snapdragon)

These annual flowers were chosen by the children for their section of garden. I've said annual, as that's how they tend to be grown, although in my wildlife (lazy!) gardening techniques some of my snapdragon plants actually survived from last year. They have also self sown round the garden. The children picked them initially because they liked the bright colours, plus they like squeezing the sides and making them snap, as I did in my childhood! However an added bonus is some of the bees seem to like them, they squeeze themselves inside, and practically disappear inside, and re appear a while later! The snapdragons aren't as popular as some of the other plants and I'm thinking it may be a certain bee that has the ability to fully utilise this plant? However I'm pleased, as it means some of the plants I never realised were obviously attractive to bees are. In the photo below you can see the pollen sac on the bees back leg, as it heads into the snapdragon. 

Bee Entering Snapdragon with Pollen Sac

Lavender

I wanted an edging to our raised beds, and was thinking of low hedge ideas, as you might be realising by now, I like flowers, colour, fragrance and so couldn't contemplate having just a green leaved hedge. Although the birds might have preferred this. So eventually I opted for lavender, which is in it's second year of planting this year, the plants have now merged together. I initially planted them 30cm apart, and they are now starting to look like a low hedge. When they are in  flower, they're a beautiful blue, and are covered in bees.

Lavender

Thyme

Another perennial herb, and one that I use a lot in my cooking, so definitely a useful culinary plant for the garden. The added bonus is when it flowers, it gets absolutely covered in flowers, and then it also gets covered in bees. The bees love it.

Bee Enjoying Thyme Flowers

An added bonus with some of these plants, is if you let them self seed, you get a natural planting scheme, and can just tinker with it. Transplanting or pulling out plants you don't want. It also works out cheaper, as you are not buying new plants all the time, and also the swathes of flowers that you get often look good together. This is my gardening style, very changeable and natural, plus I don't have a lot of time so I let nature help me.

I've found this bumble bee identification website, that looks great for trying to identifying which bees are visiting the garden. However I'm still having trouble identifying mine! I thought that most of the above were white tailed, as that's what they seem to have, but looking at the chart they could also be a buff tailed bumblebee, and the one heading into the snapdragon could be a garden bumble bee? We also get quite a few in the garden that have orange tipped tails too, like the bee in the Borage photo above. Does anybody have any more tips on differentiating them, or other useful websites? Maybe I just need more experience, or to spend more time watching them.