Home▸Ecology & Conservation Biology▸Best Annuals and Biennials for a Bee Garden (UK)

🌼 Best Annuals and Biennials for a Bee Garden (UK)

A 3D bee-garden border where you set the month and toggle showy double-flowered cultivars to see which annuals and biennials actually feed foraging bees, and which are visited and left empty-handed.

Ecology & Conservation Biology3DModerate60 FPS

A 3D garden border of eight real UK bee-garden staples, where foraging bees only get a genuine reward from flowers whose nectaries are actually open and accessible.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Biennials (foxglove, sweet rocket, hollyhock) and annuals (sunflower, cosmos, zinnia, marigold, alyssum) each have their own bloom window and their own real forage value — and showy double-flowered cultivars can look identical from a distance while offering bees almost nothing.

🎮 How to Use

Move the month slider through the UK season, toggle in double-flowered cultivars to see bees waste visits on them, and switch on the nectar-access highlight to colour every bloom by its real forage value.

💡 Did You Know?

Because foxgloves and hollyhocks only flower in their second year, gardeners who sow biennials and annuals together get a much longer unbroken run of forage than either group alone.

⚙ Under the hood

An interactive 3D garden border modelling eight real UK bee-garden staples — foxglove, sweet rocket, hollyhock, sunflower, cosmos, zinnia, marigold and alyssum — where animated foraging bees only get a genuine reward from flowers whose nectaries are actually open, exposing which showy double-flowered cultivars are visually pretty but functionally useless to bees.

bee-gardenannualsbiennialsfoxglovesuk-gardeningpollinators

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install