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

About this simulation

"Flowers everywhere" is not the same thing as bee forage. This border models eight real UK bee-garden staples — three biennials (foxglove, sweet rocket, hollyhock) and five reliable annuals (sunflower, cosmos, zinnia, marigold, alyssum) — each with its own bloom window and its own real nectar/pollen accessibility. Bees fly the border and only actually feed where a flower's centre is open and rewarding.

How it works

• Bloom window — biennials flower in their second year, in a fairly narrow early/mid-summer slot; annuals bloom longer, roughly July–October if deadheaded.
• Nectar access — single, open-centred flowers (single sunflowers, cosmos, zinnias, marigolds, foxgloves) expose their nectaries and pollen to bees.
• Double cultivars — many "showy" bred-for-looks doubles (pompon zinnias, double marigolds, pollenless double sunflowers) pack extra petals over the nectaries, so bees land, search, and leave with little or nothing.
• Bees in the scene target blooming flowers weighted by real accessible value — watch how often they waste a visit on a double bloom when that toggle is on.

Controls

• Month — move through the UK gardening season (April–October) to see which species are in flower.
• Bee count — how many foraging bees work the border.
• Include showy double cultivars — swaps in double-flowered forms of hollyhock, sunflower, zinnia and marigold.
• Highlight nectar access — colours each flower's centre by real forage value: green (good), amber (modest), red (little or none).
• ↺ Reset bees — respawns the bees and resets the visit counters. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Sowing a mix of biennials one year and hardy annuals the next keeps a continuous nectar supply, because biennials like foxglove and hollyhock only flower in their second season — a gap that reliable annuals such as cosmos and alyssum can fill from their very first summer.