The A Bee C of Gardening

Look at this little beauty:

I photographed her last week at Hidcote, the wonderful National Trust gardens in Gloucestershire, feeding on a Euphorbia.

She is Andrena cineraria, and she is common in gardens across much of Britain.

She sort of has a colloquial English name - the Ashy Mining Bee. And she's one of over 250 species of bee in Britain, of which maybe 10-20 species are in each of our back gardens.

Many species are really quite difficult to identify, so what you might think is a bumblebee might actually be a flowerbee, and what you think is a Honeybee might be any manner of solitary bees.

But don’t worry about it (I don’t!). The important thing is that all bees are nectar eaters and pollen drinkers, and that means they’re wonderful pollinators, helping turn many of our flowers into fruit and seeds.

Each species of bee has slightly different Home Needs to the next – for example, different species have different tongue lengths, making them suited to certain types of flower. Nevertheless, it is still possible to give good generic advice, so here is my 6-point plan to help all sorts of bees:

1. There are many types of garden flowers that are great for bees, but there are even more that are useless. So if you want to help bees, choose carefully.
2. Plant a range of bee-friendly plants that will give a sequence of flowers from February to November.
3. Don’t forget trees for bees. It is easy to be distracted by watching what bees are using at ground level, when some of the best plants for bees are above our heads.
4. Grow each flower en masse – bees like banquets rather than nibbles.
5. Bees like to feed in places that are sheltered, warm, and sunny
6. Don’t forget that bees need nest sites too. Different bees use different places, so try to provide a mix of undisturbed tussocky grass, warm banks of sandy soil, and soft mortar. Forget bumblebee boxes, but do try the ‘bundle of hollow cane’ type boxes.

And so which plants to choose? I've been researching this in gardens for several years, and here are some of the top groups of plants to try (in no particular order), giving you loads to choose from.

• Geranium family
• Borage family (comfreys, forgetmenots, anchusa, alkanet, lungworts, viper’s buglosses)
• Pea family (vetches, clovers, lupins)
• Dead-nettle family (woundworts, thymes, claries, bugle, mints, salvias, sages)
• Heather family (below Winter Heather Erica carnea with Honeybee)

• Rubus genus (raspberries, blackberries)
• Teasel family (teasels, scabiouses)
• Knapweeds, thistles, globe-thistles
• Alliums
• Vipers Buglosses (here with the Common Carder Bee, a type of bumblebee)

• Foxgloves
• Penstemons
• Ivy

...and for Trees for Bees, try

• Cherries
• Willows
• Cotoneasters
• And fruit trees (apples & pears)

If I had to pick my top five plants? I think I'd go for Nepeta 'Six Hills Giant', Cephalaria gigantea. Globe Thistle, Pulmonaria and Goat Willow (the latter two for early nectar).

But I want to know what your top bee plants are, if you would - go on, share your recommendations!