Lavender

2018-08-28

Certain types of lavender are among the flowers most attractive to bees. Highly bred varieties of lavender, including grosso, hidcote giant and gros blue were the most attractive to bumblebees.

Lavandula angustifolia

Wikipedia

It does not grow well in continuously damp soil and may benefit from increased drainage provided by inorganic mulches such as gravel. It does best in Mediterranean climates similar to its native habitat, characterised by wet winters and dry summers. It is fairly tolerant of low temperatures and is generally considered hardy. It tolerates acid soils but favours neutral to alkaline soils, and in some conditions it may be short-lived.

Lavandula is a genus of 47 known species of flowering plants in the mint family, Lamiaceae. It is native to the Old World

Research shows bumblebees on lavender have it licked

the University of Sussex

Nick Balfour, who is studying for a doctorate in the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI), supported by Waitrose and the CB Dennis Research Trust, says: "Lavender is a very popular plant, but with so many visitors the amount of nectar available per lavender flower is miniscule. We estimate it would take a bee one week and 300,000 flower visits to collect just one teaspoon of lavender nectar. With such small rewards on offer the faster-handling bumblebees can do much better than honey bees on lavender."

It has been known for a long time that bumblebees have longer tongues than honey bees. Our research shows that on lavender this difference is crucial.They found that lavender and borage were both very attractive to bees, but that lavender had 10 times as many bumblebees as honey bees, whereas, just a few yards away, the borage had 10 times as many honey bees as bumblebees. The researchers found that:

Bumblebees of different species did not differ significantly in the time they spent handling the lavender flowers
Bumblebees were quicker than honey bees at all three stages of lavender flower handling: search time, orientation time, and extraction time.
When the lavender flowers were shortened, this significantly reduced the extraction time of honey bees, but had no effect on the extraction time of bumblebees. This showed that the honey bees, but not the bumblebees, were being slowed down because their tongues could not easily reach the nectar.