Best Herbs for Honey Bees

If you’re keeping bees yourself or you simply wish to plant the best herbs for honey bees in your garden, then keep reading! In this article, we share the various herbal plants we’ve used to help detract bad bugs from the beehives, groundcover herbs for around the bee yard, as well as great garden herbs to provide both pollen and nectar throughout the growing season.

The best herbs to plant for honey bees as a food source are those that have the highest pollen or nectar content and which will bloom all during the growing season. There are also a few herbs you can plant to detract bad bugs from the hives and to keep the apiary (bee yard area) easier for you to maintain.

More Herbal Reading for When You Have Time:

How to Grow Unusual Herbs – Winter Sowing

Take an Herb Walk to Learn About Herbs

How to Plan and Plant a Wellness Herb Garden

50+ Herbs That Will Grow in the Shade

Let’s run through the best herbs to plant for food for the bees.

The Best Herbs for Honey Bees

If you have the space, planting your own herb garden for bees or incorporating the following herbs into your existing gardens will help your honey making friends produce enough food to see them through the winter. In the process, the pollinate all your plants as they go!

To help you take notes on the herbs you’d like to try, as well as where to put them, please join our newsletter family and immediately download these herbal profile worksheets.

Planting a Bee-Friendly Herb Garden

If you’re planting a new bee-friendly herb garden or are looking to add the best herbs for bees to an existing herbal space, then the first thing to do is to consider how the area can be the most hospitable for honey bees. Before you plant an herb, consider seeing to the following details:

Provide a wind break on the windiest side of your garden. Honey bees, as well as other smaller pollinators, are at the mercy of strong winds. If you’re not sure about which direction your prevailing winds come from, use the information in this article to find that really easily: Finding Site Data for the Homestead.
The next thing to consider is a safe water source. A bird bath with pebbles placed inside to provide a landing site for the bees to prevent drowning is perfect. Mama on the Homestead can help you with several ideas for creating a bee watering station.
Consider the orientation of the garden, too – is there at least 6 hours of sun? Bees use the sun to help them orient their direction and more will bloom with access to good sunlight.

Once you’ve got those basic elements covered, it’s time to consider the best herbs for bees to bring into the garden. I’m a big fan of herbs and, honestly, there really isn’t one I can think of that would be bad for honey bees. So, plant them all!

However, if your space is limited and you need to be selective about which herbs would be the absolute best for bees, consider those with high nectar and pollen production. Also, try to plant enough herbs that bloom at different times throughout the growing season so the honey bees have something to eat for the longest amount of time.

Best Garden Herbs for Honey Bees as a Food Source

The following are herbs typically cultivated in gardens and which are relatively domesticated. Be sure to learn to save your own seed from the herbs that grow the best and which the honey bees seem to love the most.

These are listed in roughly the order in which they bloom during the year, beginning with the earliest.

Winter Aconite
Chives
Crocus
Chamomile
Catmint & Catnip
Lemon Balm
Rosemary
Borage
Savory, Summer & Winter
Hyssop
Thymes
Sage
Fennel & Dill
Poppies
Primrose
Safflower
Valerian
Verbenas
Basil
Calendula
Horehound
Parsley
Marjoram & Oregano
Mints
Sunflowers

Best Wild Herbs for Honey Bees

These herbs are growing wild all around you and may not require you planting them in your broader community, but you might consider adding them to your herb or food gardens. You can learn to forage these plants as wild free food and medicine for you and your family, too!

Any herb that will provide food for your honey bees is one you want to cultivate, if you can!

Lamiums like Dead Nettle
Violets
Clover
Dandelions (A weed you want in your garden!)
Skullcap
Mustards
Field Daisies (Ox-Eye)
Wild Roses
Meadowsweet
Self-Heal
Bee Balm
St. John’s Wort
Cowslip
Yarrow
Joe Pye Weed
Chicory
Mallow
Goldenrod
Solidaster

Best Herbal Shrubs & Trees for Honey Bees

These larger herbal plants can be planted around the homestead for multiple uses, including food and medicine for you. These are listed in no particular order.

Rugosa Roses
Wild Plum
Oregon Grape
Hawthorne
Serviceberry and other wild berries
Any Salix/Willow
Witch Hazel
Broom
Elderberry
Holly
Bay
Locusts, especially Black (Be careful, these are considered invasive in some places.)

For more ideas, please see our article: Native Flowering & Fruiting Perennial Bushes

Honey Bees Are Hygienic and Tidy!

It’s a funny thing about honey bees that the area immediately around their beehive (25″ – 50″) isn’t a place they spend much time. Perhaps it has something to do with their sense of hygiene and propriety.

When a bee needs to defecate (poop), they’re biologically hardwired to leave the hive in order to keep the area clean and disease-free. This flight is called a cleansing flight.

Honey bees are actually very neat and tidy little buggers. The area immediately around their hive is where the feces most usually falls and so they instinctively don’t forage there. (I’m not sure that science has proven that, it just makes sense to me since you hardly see them forage right around the hive and that is where the poop falls.)

Because of this, there’s no need to plant herbs around the bee yard for the bees’ sake. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plant your best herbs around your hives, it just means that you don’t need to worry about pollen or nectar content with these herbs.

Why Plant Your Best Herbs in the Honey Bee Yard

There are two main reasons to plant herbs in the bee yard:

In order to detract pests and disease.
To make bee yard maintenance easier.

Best Fragrant Herbs to Deter Pests & Disease

These are listed in no particular order, FYI. You’ll notice that some herbs here feature on the best herbs for bees food, too. What can I say? Herbs are super useful plants and perform many jobs on the homestead! In permaculture, we call this stacking functions.

You’ll see that some of these herbs are noted for being strewing herbs. These are herbs that have been used for centuries, typically strewn on floors, to detract pests.

Others of these herbs will simply enhance the health of the area because of their antiseptic, antibiotic, and/or antifungal properties. Remember, bees like things clean and healthy!

The more you help them out with this endeavor, the more time they can spend pollinating and making honey, and the less time they have to spend worrying and working over their health.

These herbs are best to plant around the bee yard, while still giving the hives and yourself enough room to maneuver.

Scented Geranium
Feverfew
Catmint
Anise
Myrtle (usually grown as a shrub)- antiseptic strewing herb
Lavender – antiseptic strewing herb
Oregano and Marjoram
Mints
Sweet Woodruff (Galium odoartum) – strewing herb to deter moths
Artemisias like Wormwood – strewing herb for moths
Alliums

Best Groundcover Herbs to Suppress Weeds in the Honey Bee Yard

The other useful way to use herbs in the apiary is to keep them growing as groundcovers to suppress tall weeds and grasses. I’d rather not disturb the bees by mowing or weed-eating around the hives, and these groundcover herbs negate the need!

If you live in a particularly dry or unfertile area, you could simply put down carpet remnants, weed mat or cloth, or any other manufactured ground cover to suppress weeds. This can be handy for better seeing what is dropping out of the hive, what other dead bugs and material are falling to the ground in your bee yard.

However, in my climate, engineered ground cover material is easily overrun within a growing season by our vigorous weed growth in our warm/wet climate. I can’t successfully combat weeds with anything other than living botanicals that can out-compete them.

Here are some of my favorite herbal groundcovers:

Bugleweed (Ajuga)
Strawberry
Thyme
Potentilla
Clover

Both potentilla and clover are highlighted in our article, Best Groundcover Plants for Pollinators. So is strawberry, but its a special kind of strawberry you might want to read about in the post.

Helpful Herbal & Bee Resources

My favorite herb book is still the oldest one I own called, The Complete Book of Herbs, by Lesley Bremness. It’s comprehensive but not too long and has excellent photos of all the parts of each herb profiled. It also has recipes, crafts, garden design suggestions, and more.
Natural Beekeeping, by Ross Conrad can help you learn to keep bees without all the chemical applications recommended by most conventional beekeeping resources.
The Bee Friendly Garden, by Frey and LeBuhn, is an excellent resource for designing and planting pollinator gardens.

I usually find great used books on Thriftbooks.com, FYI.