Top 10 Tips for Planting for Honeybees

By Sarah Wyndham Lewis
Published on March 19, 2018
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Having bees in your garden will benefit both honeybees and your plants.
Having bees in your garden will benefit both honeybees and your plants.
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“Planting for Honeybees” by Sarah Wyndham Lewis teaches gardeners to use their backyards to give the honeybee population a helping hand.
“Planting for Honeybees” by Sarah Wyndham Lewis teaches gardeners to use their backyards to give the honeybee population a helping hand.

Planting for Honeybees (Quadrille, 2018) by Sarah Wyndham Lewisis a guide to help gardeners attract these friendly buzzing bees to their yards all season long. Wyndham Lewis also gives readers a look into the world and history of honeybees, showing why it is so important that they stick around. In the following excerpt, she gives her top 10 tips for planting a garden for honeybees.

If you read nothing else in this whole book, please read this chapter. Armed with these guiding principles, you’ll be able not only to plan your own space, but also to impress friends with brief but impressively knowledgeable lectures on how to plant specifically for honeybees!

1. Quantity, Quality and Variety

Plentiful supplies of varied forage are essential to help honeybees withstand the impact of disease and harmful environmental factors. In a single foraging trip, a honeybee will visit around 100 flowers, and she (all worker bees are female) will make around 10 to 15 trips in a day. So that’s at least 1,000 flowers a day, and this is a conservative estimate – it’s said that a honeybee might visit up to 5,000 flowers on a productive day.

2. Four-Season Planting

Although March to September are the key months for honeybees, they will fly whenever the temperature is above 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), even in the depths of winter. So early- and late-flowering plants are especially valuable. Ideally, plant ‘sequentially’ so that there is always something in flower.

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