Skip the doubles. Across a survey of 72 flowering woody plants, the modified hydrangea, cherry and rose varieties drew few bees. What those varieties shared was double petals or showy sterile sepals, while their plainer relatives kept a steady stream of visitors. That gap is the most useful thing you can carry into a nursery. If you want bee friendly flowering bushes, the flower structure tells you more than the bloom color or the price tag. Most lists of shrubs for pollinators sort by looks, so sort by structure instead.
The Annabelle smooth hydrangea in the low corner of my own yard, where the downspout drains, puts up heads the size of dinner plates every July. Nothing lands on them. I checked it with a coffee in hand for ten minutes at a stretch and counted zero bees, while three or four worked the clover in the grass behind me. Researchers at the University of Kentucky worked across 373 urban and suburban sites over four seasons. The collection came to 11,275 bees from 23 genera, and not one came off an Annabelle.
The flower explains the result. Bees come for pollen and nectar. In double flowered cultivars, extra petals take the place of those parts. Other times the petals pile up over them until a bee cannot reach in. Showy sterile sepals do the same job on a hydrangea head. They are big and bright and they hold nothing, so the plant advertises and never pays. A bee that lands, finds no reward and leaves has no reason to come back.
The spread inside one genus makes the point better than any general rule can. Panicle hydrangea averaged 31.4 bees per snapshot count and finished in the top five of all 72 species sampled. Two close relatives sitting on the same nursery bench scored nothing at all.
You do not have to tear out what you already own. A sterile hydrangea still works as a screen at the back of a bed, and leaving it standing costs the bees nothing. The fix is what you buy next. One panicle hydrangea planted beside it turns a dead corner into a stop worth making.
For the long middle of summer, buttonbush is hard to beat. It flowers right through the season, and those globe-shaped heads bring in native bees, honey bees, butterflies and sphinx moths. It is a straight species rather than a bred-up selection, so the pollen and nectar are all still where a bee expects to find them.
Check the flower in the store and not the sign. Pull a bloom toward you and look into the center of it. If you can see stamens dusted with pollen, a bee can find them too. If you see petal behind petal behind petal, put the pot back on the bench.
Buy in bloom when you can. A shrub sold in bud hides the one thing you need to check, and the tag rarely says whether the flowers carry pollen.
One caution about the numbers. The sampling ran across central Kentucky and southern Ohio, so read the rankings as a regional guide and not a national one. What each species pulls in will shift with your climate and the bees that live near you. The structure test holds up anywhere, because a flower with no reachable pollen has nothing to offer a bee in any state.
Read the full article: 10 Flowering Bushes and How to Pick One
