SEEDS OF A SOLUTION IN BEE CRISIS
Gardeners can help by choosing the right plants and avoiding harmful pesticides
Most people love to see bees in their garden, even if they don’t want to get too close to them.
Bees make a great sound as they buzz from flower to flower and you can’t help but admire their tireless work ethic as they fly miles and miles every day to collect nectar and pollen to produce honey.
If a vote was taken on the world’s most popular creature, I suspect the honey bee would be in the top 10, along with elephants, giraffes and pandas.
Every year, I learn something new about bees. For instance, I never realized how important dandelions are as a food source for bees until a friend pointed it out to me a year ago.
The same is true of the lowly crocus. I never realized what a valuable food source these tiny pretty flowers are to ravenous bees, desperately foraging for an energy boost in early spring.
I now look at dandelions and crocuses with much more respect and appreciation.
A more alarming fact is that a critical shortage of pollinating bees continues to make it necessary for farmers, particularly in China, to laboriously handpollinate fruit trees and other crops, using paintbrushes and sticks fitted with chicken feathers or cigarette filters. Children are apparently even sent clambering into trees to do the work of bees.
Apparently, a single person can pollinate between five and 10 trees a day. Bees, of course, work a lot faster and more efficiently.
The widespread collapse of bee colonies has been blamed on a number of factors, including pesticides, loss of natural food sources and an increase in diseases and predatory parasites.
But when you realize that 75 per cent of food crops require pollination by a living creature of some sort — bee, bat, bird, butterfly or other — it is shocking to see what risks we take when we mess with the process or take no interest at all. Experts like to switch this 75 per cent figure around in a more dramatic way by pointing out that bees are responsible for every third spoonful of food we eat.
All of which raises the question: What can gardeners do to help?
The answer is get busy — even busier than before — planting more bee-friendly plants and avoid using harmful pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, which are regarded as one of the key aggravating factors in the decline of the bee population.
A new resource is the book, 100 Plants to Feed the Bees (Storey, $24.95), from the Xerces Society, a U.S.-based non-profit environmental organization, focused primarily on the conservation of bees and butterflies. (The name Xerces refers to an extinct California butterfly.)
“The first simple step toward protecting our pollinators is to provide the flowers they need, using no pesticides,” says the society.
100 Plants to Feed the Bees is a handy guide to all the key wildflowers as well as native trees, shrubs, herbs and ornamentals.
Xerces says the book is dedicated to “everyone who tears up their front yard to plant big chaotic wildflower gardens, to farmers who think hedgerows and wildflower field borders are just as important as crops, to urban planners and landscapers who turn grey and lifeless concrete landscapes into corridors of biodiversity.”
Xerces recommends planting at least 12 to 20 kinds of flowering plants with at least three species blooming at any time.
Gardeners are encouraged to think big. “Pollinator gardens, wildflower meadows and habitat patches at least 5,000 square feet in size can offer a wonderful productive landscape feature for sustaining honey bees, butterflies and countless wild bees,” the society says.
Some plants, such as bee balm and rudbeckia, lobelia, echinacea, baptisia and tradescantia that we have long considered good plants for attracting bees, are listed as more suitable for gardens in the East and Midwest.
Magnolia, salvia, rhododendrons, redbud and ceanothus are recommended more for gardens in the South and Southeast.
For coastal gardens in the Pacific Northwest, Xerces recommends sunflowers, hardy geraniums, California poppies, fireweed, clarkia, solidago, lupines and penstemon. Eryngium gets a high rating for attracting sweat bees and black and gold bumble bees.
Milkweed is considered “critically important for both diversity and the abundance of pollinators,” and roses are recommended for gardens everywhere.
Blueberry, red currant, and blackberry plants are top berry plants while ideal bee-friendly tree and shrubs include plum, pear, apple and cherry trees, mahonia, arbutus, amelanchier, spirea, holodiscus and spirea.
In the herb category, lavender, mint, rosemary, borage, catnip, coriander, oregano, thyme and basil are highly rated, while key pasture plants — including sweet clover, alfalfa, mustard and buckwheat — all get two thumbs up.
It’s important to note that there are many different kinds of bees to cater to. There are 4,000 native bee species in North America.
In our gardens, we have not only bumble bees, but also mason bees, honey bees, carpenter bees, leaf-cutter bees, sweat bees and miner bees.
Some flowers are open and easy to access while others are more challenging and require the bee to pry petals apart and push their way in. It’s good to have a variety of shapes and colours of flowers, too. Bees see ultraviolet light, not red light, so flowers in the ultraviolet spectrum ( blue, green, yellow, violet) attract more bees than red flowers, Xerces says.
Some bees turn up earlier than others. Mason bees, for instance, are one of the first to appear in cool spring weather and are ideal pollinators for early-spring blooming flowers.
Leaf-cutter bees appear later, when the warmer summer weather has arrived, making them excellent pollinators in the vegetable patch, especially of peas, squash, onions, carrots, blueberries and alfalfa.
Feed the Bees, a website started by the Earthwise Society in partnership with the Delta Chamber of Commerce, is an excellent local source of information.
Ian Tait, co-chairman of Feed the Bees, says the goal is to get “people to plant more and more people to plant.”
As well as offering a basic introduction to native bees, the website provides a printable list of plants that have been identified as favourites with bees in this region.
In early spring, hellebores and mahonia are key species, followed in April and May by thrift, hardy geranium, columbine, brunnera, chives, thyme and stonecrop sedum.
For June, Feed the Bees recommends lupins, roses, foxgloves, California poppy and cornflowers. In July, penstemon, catmint, tickseed and lavender are favourites, followed in August by purple coneflower, speedwell, goldenrod and sea holly.
At the end of summer, agastache, Michaelmas daisies and sneezeweed all get the nod.
Feed the Bees also offers a comprehensive bee-friendly plant list drawn up by the Royal Horticultural Society and Michigan State University.
As well as adding plants to your garden to help feed the bees, you can also provide a place for bees to stop for a drink of water. Often all that is a needed is a shallow container of fresh water with a twig or a few pebbles in it for bees to land on while drinking. If the water is refreshed regularly, bees will return to the same spot every day.
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