The buzz on native bees
They may not make honey, but they help make better flowers in your garden
Nesting night herons made a ruckus recently in the big live oaks along North Boulevard and South Boulevard, thrilling to watch as we walked under the tree canopy with friends.
I have always loved that path, but I talked with native bee experts that day, and suddenly everything around us appalled me. We were in a green desert that extended blocks and blocks. Manicured neighborhoods do not look nearly as lush to pollinators as they do to humans. They are a stately dead zone for the fur babies of the insect kingdom.
Unlike wasps, whose more elongated bodies are hard and shiny, bees have hairy bodies and legs that act like Velcro for the pollen they eat and spread, increasing blooms and crops in the process. North America is home to more than 3,600 native species that evolved along with native plants and, accordingly, come in an incredible diversity of shapes, sizes, body strengths, tongue lengths and flower preferences. About 800 species occur in Texas.
That said, you don’t have to go far to see why so many pollinators — including other insects, birds and mammals — are dwindling or endangered. In the Southampton
neighborhood that evening, I didn’t see a single native blooming plant that might have offered nectar or pollen, much less an area that might qualify as a nesting sanctuary.
“That is a big stretch for a lot of folks,” says Kim Eierman, author of “The Pollinator Victory Garden”
($26.99, Quarry Books, 160 pages). Just putting out flowers is not enough, she adds. A bigger question might be, “Just how perfect do our lawns need to be?”
This is not about beekeeping, which aside from being impractical in most urban yards does nothing for native bee populations. Honey bees are naturalized immigrants introduced by European colonists in 1622. Native bees do not build hives or produce honey for humans. Nor are they aggressive.
While bumble bees are semi-social, with ground nests that may have several dozen cells, most natives are solitary creatures. Many are ground dwellers. Others live in cavities. Either way, most spend much of their lives at home, emerging only for about three to six weeks to do their pollination-procreation business before they die. Lawns, lawnmowers, leaf blowers and mulch are not their friends. To stick around, they need habitat that might look unsightly to humans.
An ideal ground nesting site is a sunny patch of undisturbed, open soil, which can be hidden by a surround of plants that don’t cast too much shade. Some species overwinter in burrows left by other insects or rodents. Cavity dwellers prefer fallen logs, tree snags and hollow plant stems, such as those of Joe Pye weed, which can be cut and left out for them over the winter.
Man-made bee hotels are a decent substitute for urban gardens. Available at some garden centers, they also are easy to make: They’re just boxes, usually elevated off the ground, stuffed with tubes of various sizes to accommodate different species and nesting habits. For example, mason bees plug their nests with mud, while leaf cutters use plant material.
Wizzie Brown, a Texas A&M Agrilife extension program specialist, says bee houses need to be managed to succeed. She recommends a type that can be taken apart and cleaned after the bees have left in the winter; or one made with cardboard tubes that can be replaced. If you want females (and you do), the box should be at least 6 inches deep. Bees lay female eggs at the back of the nest so they don’t get pushed out by the males, which emerge first.
The active season lasts from spring through fall, which brings us to the pretty part: flowers.
Native bees prefer native flowers, not hybrid cultivars, and tend to favor blossoms in yellows, blues and white. Different species need different blossom shapes. To attract a variety, provide open-petaled flowers such as asters, coneflowers, rudbeckias and blue mist flowers along with more complex, vertical flowers such as salvias. Bees also visit flowering crops, including basils, peppers and borage.
Since species emerge at different times, plant for a succession of blossoms spring through fall, including native flowering trees, shrubs and vines. Make it diverse but sufficient, Eierman says. She recommends massing identical flowers in swaths of at least 3 square feet if possible, to give native bees a “flower target”; or placing bunches at various spots in the yard.
“If you’re planting one of this and one of that, you’re not really helping them,” she says. “Bees go out dozens of times a day foraging, looking for one species of plant.”
The smaller the species — and some natives are teensy — the narrower their foraging range. Some travel only a few hundred feet; others can wander a mile in search of a meal. Along the way they also need water, but they can drown in bird baths and fountains. Give them a drink in a potted plant saucer of small pebbles filled with water. Change it often to discourage mosquitoes.
And don’t use pesticides, including mosquito misters. Even those that are not fatal to bees destroy their immune systems. “Eliminating pesticides is absolutely essential. No middle ground on that,” Eierman says. “It’s a matter of rethinking our perspective. More than 90 percent of insects in home landscapes are beneficial or benign.”
Speaking of which, also forget that Asian giant hornet, the so-called “murder hornets” found early this year in Washington state. Those predators have not been seen elsewhere in the United States, yet “people are starting to kill everything they think may be it,” says Brown.