Florida pages
What the bees work around here
Florida Honey Bee Plants
A lot of Florida bee-garden lists were written for a different freeze line. Use the Central Florida table.
UF/IFAS, in Florida Honey Bee Plants, puts Orlando in the same central band as the management calendar: Marion County south through Sarasota County. They list nectar plants by month for that band. This page names a few you will actually see from a bike, a ditch, or a side yard, then sends you to the document.
FDACS keeps a separate native list, Plants for Bees, that is worth having on the same desk. It is not a permission slip to plant everything that a bee will visit.
Spanish needles
The weed in the vacant lot. White rays, yellow centers, seeds that ride your socks. UF's Central Florida table lists Spanish needles, Bidens species, from March into the warm months and again through the late year. FDACS, writing about Bidens alba, calls it famine food for bees. It keeps flowering after mowing, in drought, in heat. If there is a starved week, this is often what is left.
FDACS also says it is a notorious weed in the wrong place. This page is not a planting catalog. If it is already in a wild strip near a hive, the bees will find it. You do not need to sow it in a bed.
Citrus
UF's Central Florida plant calendar lists orange, including Poncirus and mandarin types, in March and April. That is grove time in this part of the state, and it is also the week a Thornton Park lime smells like a wedding. A single yard tree is not a flow. It is still a map a scout will dance. Talk with growers about what they spray if your hives sit on their ground. The plant list will not do that conversation for you.
Cabbage palm
Sabal palmetto, the state tree. UF's Central Florida table has cabbage palm on it in spring, under the name palmetto, cabbage palm. FDACS lists cabbage palm as a native for beekeepers and puts the flowering season in summer. Read both pages for the month you are in. When a street of them opens, the heads are cream and loud. Stand under one and you hear work.
Saw palmetto
Serenoa repens. Scrub. Low. FDACS includes it on the native plants-for-bees list and gives the flowering season as summer. The bloom is a working bloom, not a landscaping idea. If you need the month, use the UF table and the FDACS list, not a forum memory.
Maple and willow
Early. Wet edges. UF's Central Florida table puts maple in January and February, and willow in January, February, and March. Red maple is also on the FDACS native list, January to February. These are the flowers that make a January hive look busy while the box is still light. Busy is not heavy. Feed if they are light anyway.
Gallberry
Ilex glabra. UF's Central Florida table lists it in April and May. Flatwoods shrub. A real nectar plant when it is in range of the yard. It is on their list. The bloom window lives there. If your block is all turf and pool screen, you will not get a gallberry year by wishing.
What else is on the table
The Central Florida calendar also names plants you will meet without hunting: oak and plum in late winter, blueberry, fetterbush, holly, Mexican clover, goldenrod, bush aster. Some of those pay. Some only keep a colony from going idle. The document is the list. This page is a walk.
What not to plant
UF's Central Florida management calendar notes a possible late flow from Brazilian pepper some Septembers. That plant is invasive. Do not plant it. If it is already in the county, the bees may work it. That is a field note, not a recommendation.
Invasives were left off the UF nectar tables for a reason. Plant natives from the FDACS list if you plant at all. Leave the Bidens in the waste ground if you can stand the socks. Mow less of the ditch than the HOA wants, if the HOA will let you.
Bloom dates move with winter and rain. If a source page would not load, we would write that the timing was unknown until it did. These names came from Florida Honey Bee Plants and from the FDACS plants-for-bees PDF. For the month you are standing in, open their pages.