Each month I’ve tried to photograph the most popular flowers for bees and bumble bees. Summer was a blur of growing and harvesting which is slowing now so I can post some of them.

Soldier poppies, California poppies and some of the later perennial poppies continued into December and later and were often full of bumble bees which blended so well and buried themselves so deep they often looked like part of the flower.

The shrubby wallflowers continued to be favourites as well. These flowered for months, from winter through into mid-summer producing more flowers on the end of each stem which again seemed to blend with the bumble bees.

This one I think is Erysimim ‘Pastel Patchwork’ and is growing through a swan plant. By December they were messy and large but the Bumbles seemed to love them so much that I didn’t trim some of them until the very last flowers were finished in February.

Hollyhock was another flower which lasted from Spring well into summer, gradually providing food for bees as each flower opened.

Comfrey, both the small ‘Hidcote’ which keeps its leaves all year, and the big deciduous Russian Comfrey Symphytum × uplandicum were especially popular with bees as well.