Just a couple from me. Thyme... they adore it. Last summer with all the flowers, fragrant and otherwise in this yard that's where they all hung out, lol... Bumbles love the monarda/bee balm but honeybees (at least in my yard) love thyme. You can keep abt a 1/3 of it trimmed at a time so it's constantly making new flowers and it'll last longer. That or plant it in different areas so it's coming into bloom at different times. They also love clover which we try to keep sown into our yard/grass. I've never fooled with them but DH raised bees and so did my folks. I just try to grow things around here that will attract them.

You prolly already know about sourwood trees, and it makes great honey.

They love my lavender and nepeta. The nepeta blooms all summer until frost...it's starting to bloom now. The Spanish lavender is in full bloom right now.

Cameron

If you have a natural area where you can let creeping charlie go wild as groundcover/lawn, they love that. That's what our backyard is and it buzzes there's so many going nuts. They love the hollies when they bloom. My spanish lavendar brings them in droves. I've watched bumbles drill through the black & blue salvia blooms. Not reach in- they drill a neat hole with their tongue and get to the nectar that way. It's funny. They do seem to like most of the salvias and the nepetas, too. They work on my caraway thyme when it blooms as well. Our neighbor briefly had a hive, and we'd often see them come onto the lily pads in our pond for a drink. So having a water source around can be a boon for them. He let the hive go about 3-4 years ago, and i still see them around a good bit, so they may have found another place to hive up and have survived the mite & other problems that's plaguing honeys.

My cat would love it if I planted the entire yard in catmint!

I do know about sourwoods and clover making great honey. Is there a difference in the taste of the honey from other plants or is it like red wine vinegar, each batch is different depending on the mix? So many questions...can't wait for the book I've ordered to arrive.

The honey bees are all over my apple trees. I can't bend over a branch to inhale without danger of sucking one into my nostril! And since we're talking edible landscape, why not blueberries? The bees aren't quite as hip to them as the other choices posted here, but they'll do the work and those are some great shrubs to have in the garden.

Honeybees also love rosemary and Georgia speedwell.

Oh- the bumbles LOVE blueberries. Not so sure about honeybees, but worth a shot.

Yes, there's a difference in the different sources of nectar in the finished taste of the product. Of course, for most home hives, it would be a mix of things, rather than a single source. I don't care much for honey myself, but do like sourwood honey. To me, it has more oomph & spiciness, and less just sweet flavor.

Have had orange blossom honey before and it is awesome! Yep, we like sourwood honey, but I don't care for it in my hot teas, because it's so much stronger it takes away from the flavor of the tea. DH does the ac/vinegar and honey goop and he loves the sourwood honey for that. On a hot biscuit it's divine, lol...

Honeybees here in Sanford seem to love my winter honeysuckle shrub, Lonicera fragrantissima. It starts blooming in early February, and along with the rosemary, we have lots of them. We even had this crazy mass/blob of them, literally thousands on this old clothesline pole for one day, and then by the evening they were gone. Does anyone have any idea what that was about? They let me get very close, but I didn't really know what I was looking for or at! -amy

That was a hive moving. That's what happened when our neighbor decided he didn't want to bother anymore and opened his hive. they hovered in a ball on one of our trees in the backyard for a day or 2, then went away. Presumably to a much better location. Very cool site. Maybe the batch you saw was a splinter part of a local hive that had gotten too big, or they just needed to relocate for some reason.

I had that happen once. Honeybees were checking out the space between the walls of my horse shelter. I heard this heavy drone one day as I went in to clean the stalls and walked around to the outside of the horse shelter to see literally hundreds of bees. I called a beekeeper, who came over and told me that they had not congregated enough for him to move them. Later that evening they were gone.

Thanks Tammy and Alicia. I thought that might be what was happening, and tried to reach a local beekeeper to see if the group might need a new home. They found their own, though. So cool!!

Here is a good link about plants for bees.

Here is a link that might be useful: Buzzworthy Plants That Attract Bees

Missed out on that list is a shrubby tree that is one of the best for bees. Vitex (chasteberry tree). Its blossoms attract all sorts of nectar drinking insects.
Best part is, by trimming off the spent flower stalks, you can get this plant to bloom over and over until frost when the leaves fall.

Vitex!...good call. I planted two this spring--one purple, one pink--and am looking forward to the show. What a neat tree/shrub!