Ancaster is a beautiful place in Southern Ontario and offers a pretty decent climate for beekeeping. You will need to prepare your beehives for the winter, but the spring and summer months are excellent for honey-making insects.

Whether you or your partner likes to garden, you should consider that bees – including honeybees – visit flowers for two purposes: to collect pollen and nectar. I know a thing or two about keeping honeybees, including the types of flowers they particularly enjoy. That’s right, having a flower patch may not just attract wild honeybees, but they could provide a great resource for beekeepers.  

To ensure honeybees find your patch worth visiting, make sure you grow plants they’ve been shown to prefer. Here are just some of the best flowers to entice your Ancaster honeybees.  

Sunflowers 

When sunflower heads open, they reveal a bonanza of tiny pollen and nectar-rich flowers. Honeybees are quite partial to these beautiful, large, sunny flowers.  

Comfreys 

Comfreys aren’t just great for honeybees, but it also attracts other pollinators such as bumblebees. These vigorous plants can also be used to make comfrey feed and comfrey ointment, for the especially crafty.  

Willows

Willows are a great source of early nectar for early-emerging honeybees. Of course, some willows can grow to be enormous, so try smaller species like Salix caprea or Salix cinerea, if you don’t have the space.  

Catmint

Honeybees and other pollinators flock to catmint plants' small but numerous blooms. They’re a good alternative to lavenders for creating beautiful floral hedges and will produce new flowers more readily when deadheaded.  

Hellebores

Like willows, hellebores are a great source of spring nectar for honeybees. They’re also handy plants for growing in the shadier spots of your garden. Hellebores dislike being moved once you’ve planted them, so make sure to plant them in a permanent spot where bees can enjoy them for years to come.  

Spring blossom 

Plants with spring blossom to grow include apples, peaches, apricots, cherries, and plums, as well as popular choices for wildlife gardens such as blackthorn and hawthorn.  

Michaelmas daisies

As summer ends, asters (Michaelmas daisies) burst into bloom, providing a rich source of autumn pollen and nectar for your Ancaster honeybees. Perfect in an autumn border combined with some ornamental grasses.

Heathers

Heathers are compact plants with small but very rewarding flowers for honeybees. Calluna species provide nectar from midsummer to autumn, while Frica species are a valuable source of nectar in the winter.

Wallflowers

Honeybees love the easily accessible blooms of wallflowers. All are exceptionally long-flowering, in particular, ‘Bowles’s Mauve”, which is capable of flowering all year if they’re continually deadheaded.

Centaurea

The Centaurea genus includes a number of species that are quite popular with honeybees, including cornflowers, mountain cornflowers, and the common knapweed.

For passionate beekeepers, making sure their honey-making companions have easy access to pollen and nectar is a priority. Hopefully, this encourages you to host your own set of Ancaster honeybees, whether they’re wild or kept by yours truly.