Bees
In beginning a ‘Friends of the Garden’ series of posts, I would like to shed light on various plants and animals that bring tremendous benefit to not only our gardens but to nature in general. These posts will include a small portrait of this friend of the garden, as well as ways to encourage this friend and make a niche for them to thrive. I enjoy watching out for all these different forms of life and how they might come to appear in the garden; it is like collecting, without disturbing anything or catching anything. At the end of the season, I get to look back at all the different forms of life I had invited into my world. Some of these friends are having a hard time, so creating corners of the world that are friendly to them is likewise important and I hope to inspire some of that with these short posts. First, the bees.
Solitary bees
Not all bees are social in nature, such as the honeybees who form intricate hives and live in colonies. Some bees, known as solitary bees, make their nests in the cracks and crevices of logs, in sand or soil burrows, or even among cavities of hollow reeds. They are still excellent pollinators and should be encouraged by a bee-friendly garden of flowering native perennials. Coneflowers are an excellent choice for these gardens as they provide both food and shelter. Examples of solitary bees include: the mason bee, the leafcutter bee, the metallic bee, miner bees, and squash bees.
Bumblers
Bumblebees come in many varieties and I am always glad to see them hanging around our garden. Something about their graceful clumsiness, the way they bend the whole stem down when landing on a flower brings me immense joy. Bumblebee types include: the American bumblebee, the red-belted bumblebee, and the yellow-banded bumblebee. There are several varieties of bumblebee that were once prolific in the U.S. but which are now in trouble due to pesticide use and habitat disruption. Bumblebees do have a queen and a colony, though they are sometimes located in the ground rather than up in the trees, as a honeybee hive typically is.
Honeybees
The honeybee is a great bee for both pollination and the economically attractive habit of making honey. Beekeeping is a wonderful hobby, perhaps even a wonderful enterprise if you are so inclined, and can teach you more about the wonders of nature. But this post is not really about the honeybee or honey production, it is more about encouraging a huge range of native bee populations just for the fun of it! We may return to the traditional honeybee work in another post.
How to Create their Niche
Let’s start low and go from there. Since many solitary bees and bumblebees make their home in or on the ground, it would be wise to provide these bees ample room to set up shop. Providing sandy soils, muddy areas, or hollow reeds will give the bees a place to make their home right in your garden. Allow your garden to ‘rest’ by leaving accumulated leafy material and twigs on the ground. This provides a refuge for all sorts of pollinating, beneficial insects to overwinter. Setting out shallow trays of water, with pebbles in the water for the bees to land on, will also encourage them.
Avoid using pesticides or chemical fertilizers in your garden. You may think the pesticides only ‘target’ the insects you do not want but these chemicals can have negative impacts on beneficial insects as well. And since their homes are made in or near the soil, treating the soil with strong chemical fertilizers may also disrupt their life cycles and make for a poor habitat. As always, do your due diligence before applying chemical anything to your garden so you can be aware of possible negative side effects, or just to make sure you are applying it correctly. Improper application of even a mild chemical can create issues.
Next, what to grow in your garden to attract the bees. I am a proponent of any flowering native perennial. If it is native, there is a chance it will provide a home for some type of native insect, even if it is not a honeybee. Since it is perennial, you won’t have to plant it every year and each year will bring a stronger growth. And because it flowers, it will provide food for birds and insects as well as beauty for your garden. It does not have to be only native plants, either.
Most websites on bee information recommend asters, echinacea (coneflower), and daisies. Black-eyed Susans and sunflowers are beautiful and also provide food and shelter for bees. We have planted prairie sunflower in our garden in the past few years as it is resilient and prolific. I have personally had good luck with sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ which does wonderfully in our local climate, as it is drought and cold tolerant, though not a native plant. The bees really seem to love it. The image above is a bumblebee sitting on blooming sedum I believe.
I would also personally recommend Anise Hyssop. It smells like warm spices and attracts so many insects to your garden, you won’t know what to do with them all. Other websites also recommend bee balm, borage, goldenrod, clover, salvia, and yarrow. We have had great experiences with borage, salvia, and yarrow as they are all incredibly hardy and return year after year – the borage is an annual but it self-seeds so aggressively that even many community gardens do not allow it to be planted. For our purposes, this is great news, as we want our pollinator-friendly garden to spread throughout the neighborhood!
Lastly, there are a few things you can create which may encourage these friends of the garden. Drilling holes in logs, providing bundles of reeds and sticks, even simple leaf and stick piles can come to serve the purpose of shelter for a native bee. There are many examples of bee structures you can DIY, plans for these projects litter the internet by the hundreds, and it would be a fun addition to your garden décor. I did not know until recently that bumblebees will use a bee-house (similar to a birdhouse) and that they are relatively simple to make. If you are not so handy to build your own, you can surely order some type of structure or have your crafty neighbor help you make one.
It may seem ridiculous to drill holes in a log or collect a bundle of sticks together but you must remember how sterile and barren the world has become. The habitable corners of the world for a native bee may be few and far between when it comes to living among us. It may be several miles of paved over road and parking lots, sterilized yards of chemically-treated turf grass, or barren xeriscape rock before they come to a spot where they can set themselves up. Drilling a silly hole in a silly little log could make the difference between them finding absolutely nothing and finding at least a little silly log.
Whenever you are creating a niche for something in your garden, just think about the main things they would need: water, food, and shelter. Then consider stopping anything which might deter your garden friends, such as chemical fertilizers or herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Soon enough your garden will be bursting with life and your garden friends will decide to come pay a visit, maybe even setting up a permanent home in your little corner of the world!
Conclusion
This post serves as a superficial primer on bees, a short look into these friends of ours and how to recognize them and bring them around. It is not the definitive source on bees and I would encourage anyone reading to look through a guide that is more thorough in its information. Below are links to several sites I visited while writing this post and which include a wealth of information on bees, their habitat, and encouraging their health. You can even order some bees over the internet if you are so inclined! Happy beekeeping!
Goodwork Almanac 