Congratulations! You have flowers! Thanks to your diligence, your home garden blossoms for bees from late winter through late fall. Oregon grape, maples, snowdrops, rock cress, pieris, last year’s kale (allowed to “go to seed”), Pacific hawthorn, cherry, apple, rhododendrons, enkianthus, raspberries, blueberries, snowberry, honeysuckle, ninebark, poppies, borage, hardhack, sedums, goldenrod, asters…
Flower pollen and nectar supply the Pacific Northwest’s many bees. The earliest to emerge, mason bees (or “blue bottle bees”), are followed by honey bees, bumblebees, sweat bees, leafcutter bees, mining bees, leaf carder bees, and alfalfa bees. Yet pollinators without sufficient cover may never reach your lovely flower smorgasbord.
Pollinators fill niches — they need niches. Your next mission is to boost habitat for bees. Follow a few simple tips to give pollinators shelter and services, nesting and resting places. Habitat means insulation from rain and heat, mud for nest building mud and leaves, hollow dead stem hideaways, and more.
- Introduce a simple bee “water feature.” Bees cannot swim and will easily drown. They need to perch to drink. Tasked to collect water for cooling the hives and for honey making, honey bees will tank up from a water-filled bowl (or birdbath) filled with hand-sized rocks.
- Allow 1 meter square of each plant. Large flowering patches are more inviting to pollinators.
- Plant early bloomers around your mason bee nursery, including a patch of open muddy soil for mason bees.
- Keep part of your yard untilled and bare of ground cover for ground-nesting, tiny, solitary bees.
- Adopt and waterproof an old birdhouse and set it out of the way on the ground where it gets early morning sun, inviting a bumblebee queen in spring to favor it for her nest.
- Preserve last year’s fronds on sword ferns as a covering skirt for foraging juncos and towhees, and maybe even as a place for a bumblebee nest.
- Incorporate a root ball of a dead or retired shrub or small tree. Scuff up some dirt and stones around it to form a bee hotel.
- Add a hollow log. Or create a wildlife snag.
- Line garden beds with driftwood or branch prunings (longer lengths, larger diameter, artfully clipped).
- Leave standing tall dead stems from last year’s perennials, for garden spiders and cavity-nesting bees.
- Add piles of pretty rocks atop small broken pieces of old pavement.
Learn more, see “A Plea for the Bees’ Needs” or the Great Sunflower Project. Ideas or questions? Contact (subject line “Erin bee habitat”).