BBKA Forum

For my bees August is usually a time where there are lots of bees and little forage available to them. What would be good to plant - either as garden plants or larger scale field/hedgerow plants to give some additional food before the ivy comes to the rescue?

Tetradium daniellii
bee-bee tree
Late summer flowering and I think the name tells you which insects it is very popular with.
I've just bought some seeds...but it's a 5-6-year project to flowering
However, if you're into planting English native species...it's Korean.

As mentioned elsewhere, we have an Abelia grandiflora in the garden and bees (both honey and bumbles) love it and it flowers profusely from mid summer into late autumn. Makes a dense bush, easy to prune and no effort to manage.

On the Welsh coast I have seen bushes of Escallonia absolutely mobbed by bees well into Autumn.

http://www.sheffieldbeekeepers.org.uk/t ... len-chart/

Looking at the pollen chart with just autumn on, there's some suggestions.
I've got borage still flowering in my garden, the privet did very little this year. We have a huge hedge near us that flowered very briefly. Usually it's out for weeks.

There's balsam flowering somewhere near but I would never suggest encouraging that. It's all along the M61 on one stretch.