Will we get Thyme Flavored Honey?
If you caught the latest episode of Growing a Greener World over the weekend, you know I’m a big advocate of growing diverse plantings for the bees. Included in this planting diversity is a mix of woody herbs. We use them to cook year-round, enjoy them as fragrant, weed-fighting groundcovers, and share happily with the bees. One herb guaranteed to lure the bees to your garden is blooming now – thyme.
Like me, the bees seem to like all kinds of thyme, from carpet-forming Elfin thyme to slightly fluffier Wooly Thyme to delicious culinary forms like Mother-of-Thyme and citrusy Lime Thyme. So, yep, I grow them all. And, after having so many varieties in the garden for so many years, odds are there are some new varieties forming from the bees fantastic cross-pollination work.
Since thyme can get a bit ratty in winter, I cut some of it hard and pull some of the older plants each year. I know that the visiting bees have pollinated the flowers so seed has formed. Each spring, I watch for new seedlings, inserting them strategically in spots where older plants were culled out.
This morning I captured all sorts of bees sharing space on a pink puff of Mother-of-Thyme about 18″ in diameter. See if you can identify and count all the different kinds of wild bumblebees, honeybees, sweat bees, hover flies and wasps sipping on the sweet herbal nectar in this video: (more…)
