Bearded Beggarticks Bidens aristosa
Bearded Beggarticks is an annual wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 3.5 ft and blooms Aug in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Bidens aristosa, known by many common names such as bearded beggarticks, western tickseed, showy tickseed, long-bracted beggarticks, tickseed beggarticks, swamp marigold, and Yankee lice, is an herbaceous, annual plant in the Asteraceae family. It is native to the central United States, but has been introduced to the eastern United States, Canada, France, Great Britain, and India. It grows in marshes, meadows, pine forests and disturbed sites. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 5–7
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 13+
- Height
- 3.5 ft
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single crown
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring through autumn
- Fruit
- Brown persists into winter
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~15 caterpillar species
Bidens supports ~15 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Bidens in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 13 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Bidens is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
13 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Bearded Beggarticks — the 12 most-recorded:
+ 6 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 13 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Bearded Beggarticks — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
13 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Bidens →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (34) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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