Best Bee Food

My clover and buckwheat duel for popularity by the bee's judgement, but I'm not not one to judge. I'm happy to see them on my scrap of land since there's been quite a lot of colonies collapsing in recent years..

I figured I'd share these photos from today and I encourage others to share your photos of plants that bees are fond of as well (with bees present is always nice...)

I hope to see some good samples..

Peace with all -

beautiful!  the honeybees that live with us are really into turnip, kale and mustard flowers right now.  i'll try to get some pictures up.

Elderberry!



Beebalm!

I don't have any pictures, but my bees went crazy over the creeping charlie when it was blooming.

Nice Ludi.. I dig both those plants.. I drink elderberry juice all the time and beebalm is an excellent '4th sister'... Thanks for the photos -

bees on the turnip flowers!

Good lookin' buggers... I literally light up when I see bees all over the things I planted explicitly for them,and others..

I love any plant that the bees can feed upon.  One of the reasons that the clovers are so critical to the bee population, is that in most regions it is the first bloom of spring that can get them producing again, after a long, quiet winter.  Clovers used to grow wild alongside every rural road in the country, but county road crews think they are doing the world a favor by mowing them before they get a chance to reseed.  Ho-hum.

This is some kind of 'wild' bee happily rolling around in the wild Cistus flowers scattering pollen everywhere.  I think this behaviour is why bees like mason bees are more effective pollinators - they are literally coated with pollen!




And this is yet another type of wild bee - a lovely silvery coloured one - enjoying a (domestic) Phacelia tanacetifolia flower. 



There seem to be an incredible number of different types of wild bee in Portugal, including huge hairy ones that I always want to adopt as flying teddy bears, and tiny little solitary miner bees who seem to like digging holes right where I want to walk. 

I don't recall the name of this plant but it is a pretty common landscaping plant that you can find at Lowe's.  The bees sure love it.









Here you can see some of the pollen flying.  The bees work at a frenetic pace, it was pretty hard to get a decent photo.

Nice, keep the photos and descriptions comin'!

Hi, I wish I'd taken a photo on a sunny day.  Today was ~70 degrees F and grey skies, so the bees were not out in numbers.  In a 50 sq ft area there were perhaps a hundred honeybees all over these plants (edit: on a sunny day!).  A lot of diversity: wasps, smaller beas, mason bees, a lot more insects I don't know the name for.

Do you know the name of this plant?  It grows about 4' high.  I'm down in zone 6b.

I feel so empty not coming to game day with photos, but I do follow my bee's and can spot them in a neighbour's yard no problem.
When it comes to local plant's that I see them putting a hurting on, I have to say buttercup's are holding down the fort! Salmon Berry, Black Berry, Lingon Berry, wild rose. Everything else was man planted that I see them tackling secondary to those. I can only dig in the bush on rainy day's because one step into the buttercup's and I'm told I'm messing up a good thing. Oh and bugle I've seen them in the rain working the bugle's to sleep.  On the flip side my honey bee's havn't touched the lupin's, comfrey, and herb robert. Those seem to be bumble bee favorite's as there on em from sun up to sun down. This thread is making me want to skip a day of farming and break out the macro lens badly.

Thanks for chiming in Saybain, Let's see your macro shots...I'm waiting...:- )
Peace -