BEE FRIENDLY GARDENS I
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Bee Friendly Garden
WHY DESIGN AND PLANT A BEE FRIENDLY GARDEN? Wildlife-loving gardeners across the world enthuse about planting butterfly gardens, but relatively few think to design and plant a bee garden. Designing and planting a bee garden will bolster the health of your garden and help conserve one of earth’s treasures. By planting a bee garden, you too can do your part to help the bees by adding to the shrinking inventory of flower-rich habitat in your area. In return, the bees will pollinate your flowers, providing a bountiful harvest of fruits, seeds and vegetables as well as the joy of watching them up close.
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Bee Friendly Garden
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CHOOSE PLANTS THAT ATTRACT BEES Bees love native wildflowers, flowering herbs, berries and many flowering fruits and vegetables. Some honeybee favorites include mints, basil, sage, thyme, borage, oregano, lavender, chives, buckwheat, berries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, cucumbers, tomato, winter squash, pumpkins, melons, watermelons, flowering broccoli, crocus, snowdrops, jonquils, tulips, sunflowers, asters, dandelions, clovers, lilacs, wisteria, cosmos, black-eyed susans, gaillardia, cup plants, goldenrod, loosestrife, bachelor’s buttons, bee balm, sedum, peony and honeysuckle. If you have the space, planting any type of fruit tree is perfect and trees such as maple, willow, black locust and sumac are also good food sources for bees. Planting Snowdrops or Siberian Squill in your yard is another simple way for a suburban gardener to provide an early spring food source for bees.
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GROUP THE SAME PLANTS TOGETHER
Try to plant at least one square yard of the same plant together to make a perfect bee attractor. But if you are short on space planting just a few wildflowers or herbs in a planter or window box is all that’s needed to provide more foraging habitat for the honeybee.
PICK PLANTS WITH LONG BLOOMING CYCLES
Picking plants with long blooming cycles or choosing plants with successive blooms will keep the bees coming back again and again. A seed kit like this makes attracting bees to your garden easy. And will look beautiful.
Annual Flowers
The easiest way to use annuals that are especially valuable at attracting bees, is to plant an annual seed mix that has been especially formulated to do the job. Just seed the mix into one of your raised beds or dig up an adjacent patch of soil next to your vegetables and sow in the spring. The key is to plant flowers, lots of flowers that bloom over a long time in the growing season to complete the web of life in your yard and garden. That first juicy tomato of the season will tell you it is worth the effort. Bees seem to be attracted to some flower colours more than others, so try a variety of colours in your garden to ensure you have just the right thing for them. Some of the best bee attracting plants I have observed include:
Plants that Bees love: –– –– –– ––
Lavendar Rosemary Agapanthus Hebes
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Echinacea Pestemons Sage Native
Flowers –– Nasturtiums –– Herbs –– Wild Flowers
Bee Friendly Garden
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LET YOUR PLANTS FLOWER
Leave the flowers on your plants and deadhead them to allow the honeybees to get the pollen and nectar they need. If you are growing herbs or vegetables such as broccoli, harvest it but leave the plant intact. When you are done let it go to flower for the pollinators and leave it in the garden until the flowers are gone. Last December, I saw firsthand how important a food source like broccoli left to flower in a backyard garden was to my honeybees at a time when nothing else was available for them to eat. The Importance of Spring to Fall Flowers By planting a succession of flowers to bloom from early spring to fall in our yards and near the vegetable garden, we help to build the honeybee population and keep them around for the whole growing season. This is of particular importance from mid-summer into fall when the majority of the pollinatordependent veggies are in flower. We can get this done with a nice mix of annuals, perennials and culinary herbs.
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PROVIDE A FRESH WATER SOURCE
A sloping bird bath with stones for bees to stand on, a backyard waterfall, a pool, a dripping hose, almost any shallow water source will do. Cabbage and broccoli leaves full of fresh morning dew, and newly watered potted plants with peat soil are favorite destinations for my bees. Why do bees need water? –– Water helps cool the hive –– They use water to raise the humidity in the hive –– They use water to dilute or de-crystalize honey to feed larva –– Water is used to keep brood moist –– They especially need water during strong brood rearing times such as early spring.
How can you provide water? There are numerous ways to provide water for bees. Remember bees do not swim very well so provide them a landing pad of some kind! You can use sticks, rocks, cork, Styrofoam, etc. –– –– –– –– –– ––
Bird baths Small water feature with plants Leave a faucet dripping on a board Chicken waterers A dog or cat feeder/waterer Drips around irrigation hoses
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Bee Friendly Garden
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DO NOT USE PESTICIDES, HERBICIDES OR OTHER CHEMICALS IN YOUR GARDEN Or anywhere in your yard including your lawn, other gardens and trees. After all, you are trying to attract bees right? Most of these chemicals are toxic to bees and have widespread effects which are detrimental to plants, beneficial insects and other native pollinators. This ban also applies to products your lawn care company uses. When in doubt leave it out.
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APPRECIATE THE BEAUTY OF WEEDS
Dandelions, clovers, loosestrife, milkweed, goldenrod and other flowering weeds are very important food sources for bees. In areas filled with green sprawling lawns, dandelions and clovers are vital plants for a bees survival. Let them grow and flower in your yard and you will soon have your own personal honeybee sanctuary. The next time you see a dandelion going to seed, grab it, blow those seeds around and feel good knowing you are doing your part to help save the bees. It can’t be more simple than that!
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Bee Friendly Garden
VEGETABLES THAT NEED BEES FOR POLLINATION Watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, pumpkins, eggplant, hot peppers and gourds all must have bees to pollinate them. Tomatoes, while self-pollinating, will have better fruit and seed set (important to gardeners who collect their own heirloom tomato seeds) when their flowers are vibrated by visiting bees.
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RESOURCES
1. https://thehoneybeeconservancy.org/plant-a-bee-garden/
2. https://www.mybeeline.co/en/p/planting-attractive-bee-garden 9
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