Good bee food
Grow healthy ecosystems
Everyone can make the difference
South Africa is home to an extraordinary diversity of flowering plants. Combined with our varied soils, climates and rainfall patterns, they create a rich mosaic of forage for honey bees.
Use this section to find the plants that support honey bees where you live. Learn about Weeds for Bees, the role of Gums for Bees & Biodiversity and how to grow your garden buzzy.
Whether you manage a farm, open land, a business or a small garden, every forage plant makes a difference.
Buzzy bounty
Annuals and bi-annuals
Annuals complete their life cycle in one growing season, while biennials take two growing seasons to mature, flower and set seed. Both can add colour and diversity to your garden, providing valuable pollen and nectar for honey bees and other pollinators. Plant a variety suited to your local climate and growing conditions to provide forage throughout the seasons.
Bees trees
Trees provide an important source of pollen and nectar for honey bees, often flowering when other food sources are scarce. From indigenous trees to exotic garden favourites, discover trees that can help feed honey bees and bring more life to your garden.
Bees weeds
Trees provide an important source of pollen and nectar for honey bees, often flowering when other food sources are scarce. From indigenous trees to exotic garden favourites, discover trees that can help feed honey bees and bring more life to your garden.
Creepers
Creepers and climbing plants can provide valuable pollen and nectar for honey bees while making use of vertical space in your garden. From flowering climbers to indigenous species, choose plants suited to your climate to help provide forage and support biodiversity.
Bulbs, Tubers, Rhizomes & Corms
Bulbs, tubers, rhizomes and corms bring seasonal colour to your garden, with flowering varieties that provide pollen and nectar for honey bees. Choose bee-friendly plants suited to your climate to keep your garden blooming.
Ground covers
In South Africa, an international hotspot for bee diversity, indigenous flowering ground covers are vital for sustaining healthy honey bee populations and boosting local ecosystem health. Tough, water-wise succulents like vivid Gazania (treasure flowers), fleshy Carpobrotus (sour fig), and carpet-forming Delosperma (vygies) thrive in arid conditions while transforming bare ground into accessible, high-energy foraging zones.
Clumps of clumping or trailing species like Bulbine frutescens (stalked bulbine) bloom continuously across spring and autumn, offering critical, high-protein pollen during seasonal forage gaps when larger trees are dormant. By securing soil moisture and providing a pesticide-free understory, these low-maintenance indigenous mats establish a resilient, year-round food supply that sustains both wild colonies and the managed bees critical to South African commercial agriculture.
Gums for bees
In South Africa, the relationship between honey bees and Eucalyptus (gum) trees is a vital yet complex ecological balancing act. They serve as an essential lifeline for the beekeeping industry, supplying continuous, reliable nectar flows and high-quality pollen that generate roughly 50% of the country's total honey crop.
Because these massive blossoms sustain managed colonies during seasonal forage gaps, they keep bee populations robust enough to pollinate agricultural crops, servicing a service crucial to national food security. However, because six gum species are declared aggressive alien invaders that deplete scarce water resources, South African environmental regulations balance this need by enforcing strict rules.
Landowners are encouraged to carefully manage their properties by removing invasive gums from sensitive riparian zones while legally preserving non-invasive or exempt trees in designated areas to protect this invaluable pollinator food corridor.
Herbs and crops
If you want to help South Africa's hard-working honey bees right from your own backyard, planting a mix of herbs and flowering plants is one of the best things you can do.
Our local bees are the ultimate garden helpers, pollinating everything from suburban veggie patches to massive commercial farms that grow our country’s sunflowers, macadamias, and Western Cape fruits.
By filling your garden beds or containers with everyday favorites like basil and rosemary, or indigenous stars like buchu, you create a high-energy supermarket for bees. These herbs act like superfoods, packed with the rich nectar and pollen bees need to stay healthy, raise their young, and survive the quiet months when food is scarce.
Even a small patch of pesticide-free herbs gives our wild bee populations a safe haven, helping them stay strong so they can keep your garden, and South Africa's food supply, thriving.
Shrubs and succulents
If you want to keep your backyard buzzing year-round, turning your attention to shrubs and succulents is a fantastic strategy. These structurally tough plants are the backbone of a bee-friendly garden, especially during the harsh South African winter. Incorporating robust native shrubs like Polygala myrtifolia (September bush) or nectar-heavy aloes and Crassula species (like pink joy) provides an invaluable lifeline. While most garden flowers disappear when the cold sets in, these resilient plants step up to offer rich pollen and sweet nectar precisely during critical seasonal gaps.
Because succulents and indigenous shrubs are perfectly adapted to our local climate, they require very little water to produce high-value rewards. By adding them to your rockeries or boundaries, you create a low-maintenance, drought-resistant buffet that keeps both wild colonies and local apiaries healthy and strong.
Veld plants
If you want to invite the true spirit of the South African wilderness into your backyard, planting indigenous veld plants is a brilliant way to support our native honey bees. Wild veld species are the ultimate, locally adapted survival food for bees, transforming open garden spaces into vibrant biodiversity corridors.
These rugged survivors are exceptionally water-wise and perfectly timed to bloom across different seasons, offering vital pollen and high-quality nectar when conventional garden flowers fade. By dedicating a corner of your property to natural veld plants, you provide an essential, chemical-free sanctuary that keeps wild swarms strong and preserves the unique, untamed flavours of South Africa's diverse honey.
The electric relationship between bees and flowers
Bees can sense the electric fields of flowers. When a bee visits a flower, it changes that electric field, letting other bees know that the flower has recently been harvested.
Here is how this amazing process works
Bees get positively charged As bees fly through the air, they bump into tiny particles like dust and small molecules. The friction from these microscopic collisions strips electrons off the bee's surface, leaving the bee with a positive electrical charge.
Flowers are negatively charged Flowers are physically grounded (electrically earthed) to the Earth. Because the air around them carries a voltage that increases with height, a negative electrical charge is induced right on the flower's petals.
The pollen "jump" When a positively charged bee flies up to a negatively charged flower, the opposite charges attract each other so strongly that the pollen literally jumps from the flower onto the bee before it even lands.
A natural "Do Not Disturb" sign When the bee lands, its positive charge alters the flower's electrical field for a short time. Research suggests this quick electrical shift acts as a warning signal, letting the next passing bee know that the flower's rewards have just been taken.
From arid regions receiving less than 50 mm of rain each year to areas with more than 800 mm, from summer and winter rainfall regions to places with months of frost, every landscape presents different opportunities and challenges for both plants and bees.
Like the plants they depend on, honey bees experience periods of abundance and periods of scarcity. Planting with these seasonal gaps in mind is one of the most practical ways to support healthy colonies and resilient ecosystems.
Honey bees adapt by storing honey, regulating the temperature of their brood nest and, when necessary, moving to areas where forage is available. As they gather nectar and pollen, they pollinate thousands of plant species, making them an essential part of healthy ecosystems.