What Flowers Attract Bees?

What flowers attract bees? Quite a lot!

Bees love and need flowers. It’s their food. I’ll save any suspense and let you know that when it comes to what flowers attract bees, most every flower is bee-friendly! And growing flowers of any type in any capacity at home is an awesome act of helping the bees. If you are growing flowers to attract bees, thank you.

While most flowers attract bees, here are a few things to consider when planting bee-friendly flowers:

#1 Diversity: is most useful to bees. For example, it’s more beneficial to plant a few different shapes and colours of flowers, than it is to plant all sunflowers.

#2 Seasons: bees need to eat all year round, so while it’s great to plant a bee-friendly garden once, it’s even better to plant a new crop of bee-friendly flowers each season. This is why I have a Bee Friendly Seed Pack (great for hot summers) and a Spring Pollinator Seed Pack (great for more mild weather like autumn and spring).

#3 Flowering weeds: when observing what flowers attract weeds, I noticed that flowering weeds are a HUGE favourite, including the little yellow dandelion flowers you see pop up in gardens. I know many people like to have super neat gardens with all the weeds pulled up, but I’ve trained myself to leave the dandelion and other “weeds” for the bees instead of automatically pulling them out.

#4 Bees are extremely canny! They cruise by my garden to check things out, even when my plants are only tiny seedlings. They know flowers are coming! However, if you’ve planted a bee-friendly flower garden and no bees are visiting (this happened to a friend of mine) you need to ask yourself is there a reason why bees are staying away. If you use chemicals of any type on your garden, bees will avoid you and we don’t want that!