In article , "Pepperqueen"
wrote:

Hello!
I have a question for a friend of mine, who would love to know if there are
any types of flower plants that would "not" attract bee's?
Thank you,
Deb

Any plant that flowers after August or in winter: cyclamens, carnelian
cherry, witchhazel, dawn viburnum, snow-crocuses, autumn crocuses,
snowdrops, hazels, winter jasmine, hellebores, winter iris, Camellia
sasanqua, several kinds of pussy willow shrubs, winter-flowering
honeysuckle, sarococca, kaffir lilies, heathers.... Most of these are
pollinated either by winter moths, or the wind.

Even some rhododendrons & azaleas bloom so early the bees aren't yet
abroad, such as 'Milestone' 'Karin Seleger' 'Crater's Edge' 'Christmas
Cheer' 'Prairie Fire' 'Pink Delight' 'Seta' 'Colonel Coen' 'Abegail,'
'Lois' 'Olive' 'Conemaugh' 'PJMs' 'Fran Sumner' 'Rosamundi' 'Praecox'
'Lee's Scarlet' 'Cilpinense' R. mucronulatum, R. moupinense, R.
pachytrichum, R. dauricum, R. ciliatum, R. pemakoense, R. balfourianum....
& so on.

Kaufmanniana tulips attract very few bees as they bloom too early for most
bees to be active. A few solitary bees may appear early enough to take
advantage of kaufmannianas.

Evening-bloomers are in general looking to be pollinated by moths. The
bees are asleep by the time evening-bloomers open up & release perfume.
Examples: Moonflower vine; evening-blooming varieties of daylilies &
primroses & datura & jasmine; flowering sweet-tobacco; brugmansia;
matthiola; yucca...

Grasses, sedges, corn, wheat, rice, oats are all wind-pollinated. There
are ornamental varieties of sundry grasses & grains that have quite
interesting flowers yet don't attract bees.

Dwarf conifers, if you'll settle for cones instead of noticeable flowers.

Grape flowers are mostly but not exclusively wind-pollinated & are only
moderately attractive to honeybees which won't go out of their way for
them, & are grapes are not at all attractive to native solitary bees. But
wasps will be attracted to overripe or fallen fruit.

Hardy terrestrial orchids, usually ant-pollinated.

Big bright red flowers are not usually attractive to bees (bees prefer
blue or violet flowers, or white flowers that look blue to bee vision).
Bees certainly CAN see red flowers contrary to common belief (& some red
flowers have more blue in them than our human eyes can easily judge), but
bees do take longer to find red flowers, so bright pure reds are never
their favorites, & the bigger red blossoms are trying to attract birds
and/or butterflies so have evolved all sorts of tricks to discourage
visits by bees. Even "bee balm" famous for attracting bees, the super-red
cultivar 'Jacob Kline' can be completely ignored by bees that are all over
a purple bee-balm right next to the unvisited red. Some things like
trumpet-flower vines or crossvines or even some types of penstemons -- the
reason they are bright red-red or orange is because they want to be
visited by birds, especially hummingbirds, & some of these flowers will
even have their pollen down a deep tube perfect for bird-beaks or
butterfly snouts, but too narrow for bees to enter. If you planted a
garden entirely of red & yellow tubular flowers, & another entirely of
blue & white flat or open flowers, you'd see an extravagant preferenced
for the blue & whites.

Bright red carnations & other dianthus do sometimes attract bees, but both
in their color & their tendency to release their perfume at evening, they
are trying to avoid being found by bees, as they are looking for hot sex
with night-pollinators.

Any flower that smells putrid tends to be attracting flies instead of
bees: Skunk cabbage, voodoo lilies & the majority aroids; dutchman's pipe,
many flowers of the milkweed family, "starfish" cacti. FOrtunately the
majority of the most awful of the awful smelling flowers only stink bad
for a couple days (they stop stinking as soon as a fly has visited), &
others stink only if you poke your nose right inside them, so they're
still fine for the garden.

Blue potato vine. Bees may have a preference for blue flowers, but they
don't seem to like this blue flower.

Asparagus. Tomatos. Peas. Gourds. Some ground-nesting bees do like gourds
& squashes so it varies; some varieties are almost exclusively beetle &
ant pollinated.

Native wild ginger have their flowers lying on the ground to attract
crawling beetles & ants, & have a scent that discourages bees. Most
things that lay their flowers flat on the ground are not attracting bees,
they're attractive to crawling insects.

Super-eency flowers that appear in dense clusters to become showy despite
the teenciness of the individual florets are usually trying to attract
ants or beetles, not bees. Eenciest white flowers of groundcovers tend
also to be ant-pollinated & are way too little for bees to bother with.

Larger flowers that attract ant pollinators rather than bees include trout
lilies, jack-in-the-pulpits, cleome, snail vine, spurge...

Some flowers are trying to attract beetles as they fly. These tend to be
white flowers with less than either no detectible perfume or an unpleasant
perfume, & bees don't like them. Included would be Cow-parsley flower,
Angelica, Magnolia, Clethra, Sumac, Goldenrod, Pawpaw, Buttonbush,
California poppies, & Dogwood.

Honeybees have very little interest in Manzanita, Blueberries, Cranberry,
& most other flowering/fruiting shrubs that produce urn-shaped dangling
flowers. Leafcutter bees & other solitary bees do pollinate these readily
enough, but that doesn't usually lead to huge numbers of bees at one time,
unless you intentionally provide a habitat for them to lay eggs, &
solitary bees are kind of lazy & won't hunt nectar for any distance from
where they are born. A few colonizing bees (ground-nesting bumblebees) do
like urn-shaped flowers but they don't travel great distances to get them,
as honeybees would do for their favorites, thus ground-hives would have to
be right in the garden for those bees to appear in any numbers.

Honeysuckle vines attract few bees surprisingly enough, being most heavily
scented at evening to attract moths, & long-tubular flowers to attract
hummingbirds but too narrow for bees to enter, & in shades of red bees are
slowest to find. Any flowers that dangle & are tube-shaped tend to be
inaccessible to bees (although a few solitary bees do cleverly know how to
cling to the bottom of tubes &amp shake the living daylights out of them
until nectar runs down to them).

I am curious why you wouldn't want bees. In temperate zones at least, the
bees are extremely tame & very difficult to cause to sting or swarm, one
really has to work hard at it to make them angry. My step-grampa Gordon
could've died from a single bee sting but I never knew him to be stung the
bees were so safe around people, & my great-grampa Perry le[t honeybee
hives. Bees were all over the place but I never knew Gordon to have to
rush & get a shot & be hurried to the doctor, even though all the kids
were warned it was a possibility none of us ever saw it happen. So bees
are innocuous & very pleasant to observe, & even the rare poor soul with
an allergy is vastly more at risk of injury driving to the grocery store.

Bees will visit even those flowers they do not actually like or pollinate,
just to check them out, so you can never really arrange a garden to never
have bees in it at all, though there certainly are endless numbers of
interesting plants that do not encourage them.

-paghat the ratgirl
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