I’ve learned that the poppies I saw my honey bees on yesterday are a variety referred to as the Ziar Breadseed Poppy, a variant of Papaver somniferum, or possibly exactly that.
Ziar Breadseed Poppy (October 19th, 2019).
I will be planting as many of these as I can next year to give my bees an extra hit of pollen before winter, that’s for sure.
A few years ago, I bought (I believe) a one-pound bag of bread poppy seeds from the grocery store and spread them over a huge bald spot in my yard. I only needed about a half-cup for that. Anyway, the plants grew very fast and produced a ton of flowers on each one. The flowers were very simple and almost white. Bees were all over them, sometimes 5 or 6 in one flower. The amount of pollen they got from them was insane. I still have most of the original bag of seeds because now I just save a few pods to reseed the areas each year. The open pollination results in some cool variations, all of which the bees go nuts for.