The best plants to grow for bees
Which flowers provide the greatest support for our declining bees? Rosi Rollings reveals her top 12 bee magnets to ensure your borders are buzzing
For 25 years I worked in financial services in London, but I dreamed about growing plants for a living and spent every spare moment in my little greenhouse sowing seeds. My husband and I had been honey beekeepers for a few years and it seemed like a natural progression to want to understand which plants bees needed to provide them with food.
When I started looking into this, I found plenty of lists of recommended plants, but most of them were conflicting or lacking in detail or science. So I bought lots of plants and started trying to count how many bees visited them. Luckily for me, in 2013 I found out that the University of Sussex’s Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects was carrying out similar research. So I attended a workshop there, which helped me develop a more scientific and consistent method for my research. For the next six years I conducted plant trials to identify which plants attracted the most bees. During this time, I also went part-time with my proper job, which allowed me to set up an online plant nursery. My bee and plant research was fundamental to the start of the plant nursery, enabling me to be sure that the plants we chose to sell really were going to offer as much food as possible for all types of bees and in whatever space our customers had to offer.
Taking a snapshot
The research method is really quite simple and is based on the regular counting of bees per square metre of the same plant. Known as a ‘snapshot’ method, it means that you can very quickly count how many bees are on the plants at that moment, and repeated counting gives you an average number of bees per square metre.
The tricky bit is trying to identify them at the same time. To make that easier, I categorise them as honeybees, bumblebees or solitary bees. I did this weekly and looked forward to spending that time among the flowers with bees buzzing all around.
For six years I conducted trials to identify which plants attracted the most bees per square metre