The best plants for Bees

So, Britain needs more plants for bees and other pollinating insects. Bees and plants are essential to food production. They work for free and without them our food choices would be very limited and probably very expensive.

Recently, Sarah Raven’s TV programme “Bees, Butterflies and Blooms” highlighted the need for all of us to plant more bee-friendly plants. Furthermore, The Olympic Meadows have shown us how beautiful these plants can be.

Uniquely, Meadowmat Wildflower Turf has been carefully designed to make establishing bee-friendly wildflower meadows as easy as possible.

 

Regrettably, many of our garden flowers, like double flowers and hybrid roses are the wrong shape for bees to feed from.

Meadowmat is a low maintenance way to make a wildflower meadow with an easily accessible and rich source of nectar for a wide range of bees.

The table below shows which plants in Meadowmat are particularly good for bees.

UK bee species include – Honeybees, 200 or so species of solitary bees and 24 species of bumblebee.

Plant	Honeybees	Short tongued bumblebees	Long tongued bumblebees	Solitary Bees
Autumn Hawkbit	√			√
Birds-foot trefoil	√	√	√	√
Bugle		√	√	√
Buttercup				√
Catsear				√
Cranesbill	√	√	√	√
Clover	√	√	√
Cowslip			√
Grass		√	√
Hawkweed				√
Knapweed	√	√	√	√
Mallow		√	√	√
Oxeye Daisy				√
Red campion			√
Red clover	√	√	√
Scabious	√	√	√	√
Vetch		√	√	√
Vipers Bugloss	√	√	√	√
Yellow Rattle		√	√
Wild Carrot				√
Yarrow (Achillea)	√	√		√