Als Garden Center :: Creating a Pollination Friendly Garden with Native Bees

By Lisa Novich, Owner of Knox Cellars Native Bees

You and I owe our existence to pollination. Bees, flies, wasps, butterflies and bats all lend their efforts to insuring we have food to set on our tables. Fully three quarters of everything we eat relies on pollination. The connection between bees and apples is fairly obvious

however the connection between beef and pollination or pasta and pollination is slightly more obscure. If alfalfa and corn failed to be pollinated we would not be able to feed the cows and chickens, sweeten food with sugar, or raise goats to produce those wonderful soft cheeses that mark my favorite pasta dishes. By some estimates the native bee population in North America is so significantly decreased that the future of our food chain is in serious danger. We can help. If each of us commit just a small portion of our gardens to pollinating insects, we will make a significant contribution to the health of our community.

Years ago, most of us designed gardens to please our eyes, nose and tastebuds without much thought to the little guys in the garden that made it all possible. Fruit trees bore fruit, vegetable gardens produced tomatoes and corn, and flowers bloomed for color and scent. As long as the aphids didn’t eat up the roses, we didn’t concern ourselves with how this all

happened. Chemical companies spent lots of money promoting their quick fixes for anything that might mare our perfect landscapes or annoy our garden experience with buzzing, stings, or unsightly weeds. We ate it all up and unknowingly damaged the delicate balance of predator and prey, plant and pollinator that exits in a healthy garden. To top it off, a number of years ago two foreign mites were accidentally brought to the United States and these mites have desimated the feral honey bee populations that so many of us relied on for garden pollination.

We’ve come a long way in the last decade or so. These days more and more of us are concerned with creating gardens that benefit the environment as well as our eyes. This has come about for a variety of reasons. We are finally opening our eyes to the inter-relatedness of species and the need to protect even the seemingly insignificant bugs in our garden. Perhaps more importantly, in the last ten to fifteen years, the native pollinators of our gardens have suffered a large decline and thus we are faced every year with fewer and fewer fruits on our trees and veggies in our garden. Perennials and annuals set fewer seeds and reproduce less readily than we used to enjoy. For people who have had to resort to hand pollinating crops, the decline in pollinators has instant affect.

I have been actively involved in creating pollinator gardens for more than ten years now and I assure you it is easy and very rewarding. My flowers are brighter, my trees are laden with fruit, and the birds flock to my garden because they like the vegetation and the extra bugs to eat. Their droppings enrich my soil, and to top off the benefits, I no longer have to use chemical treatments to avoid crop damage from plant eating insects.

The battle for better pollinators has three major fronts. Provide habitat, provide food, and reduce or eliminate use of chemicals. For this article we will concentrate on the first two. Please do some research or contact the Agricultural Extension agent in your area for information on chemicals.

One of the best pollinators to add to your garden is the Orchard Mason Bee (Osmia lignaria). These gentle little pollinating bees are native to almost all of North America with the exception of Mississippi, Louisiana, and southern Florida. Mason bees are small, shiny blue-black solitary bees. They are frequently mistaken for flies by gardeners who don’t know of their existence. They do not produce honey, have a hive, or a complicated social structure. There is no queen or workers, only males and females and every female lays eggs. These bees lay their eggs in holes. In nature they would find an old beetle hole in a tree, or a dried and broken reed with the proper (5/16) interior dimension. Solitary bees are generally very gentle. They do not need to protect big hives to ensure survival but instead rely on laying eggs in holes and wandering off to lay other eggs in other holes. The law of averages guarantee that at least some of them survive. Nature has given solitary bees that happen to be aggressive no advantage in survival of their young and thus it has not developed as a genetic trait.

Mason bees begin their life cycle around March 1 in my Seattle area home. In your area, normal emergence will occur when the daytime temperatures rise above 50 degrees with some regularity. In southern states, this can be mid February, in colder climates it can be as late as the end of April. Rest assured, Mother Nature will get your Mason

bees active about the time the first blooms are appearing. As the days warm, the mason bees emerge from their natal cells where mother bees laid them last spring. Males emerge first, followed within a few days by the first of the female masons. After mating, the males die, and the females begin actively collecting pollen and nectar from your spring blossoms. They carry the pollen and nectar back to a clean nesting hole where they mix these ingredients to make a “bee bread”. The female puts a lump of beebread, about the size of a pencil eraser, at the back of an empty hole. She then lays an egg directly into the pollen mix and proceeds to build a door of mud and create a cell for the egg to rest in. She then goes back to the blossoms and begins again to bring back pollen and nectar to provision another egg cell just in front of her previous one. This process continues until she has filled the hole. A nesting hole 3 inches deep will generally contain 4 or 5 egg cells. A nesting hole six inches deep can hold up to twelve eggs.

Almost three months after the emergence of the first male mason bee in your garden, the entire visible mason season is over. All the adult bees have died and their eggs will spend the next nine months developing into adult bees or hibernating in their cells. Come next spring, they will chew their way out of their cocoons and begin the cycle over again

Providing habitat and food for these bees is easy. Suitable nesting material is available for purchase from many independent nurseries or over various web sites. If you are buying or making nesting habitat look out for the following things.

Wood Blocks

Wood blocks should be made of a good, clean, non-fragrant wood such as fir, alder, or hemlock. Don’t buy any block made out of treated lumber and try to avoid cedar or redwood which are not high on a bees preference list.
Blocks should have holes with a 5/16^th inch interior diameter and an interior length of at least three inches.
Holes go straight into the block. There should not be an interior chamber and the hole should not punch out the back end.

Nesting System Tubes

Look for a six-inch long tube. Six inches will give you the highest percentage of female eggs. Since female bees do the lions share of the pollinating work in this species, girls are the name of the game.
Make sure your tubes are made of paper or cardboard. The female is setting damp pollen and nectar in this hole and laying a live egg into it. This eggs breaths, eats, and defecates while the beebread seeps liquid into the side of the tube. Your bee needs to be inside an absorbent tube, which breathes, or the results will resemble those mysterious Tupperware surprises you find at the back of your fridge. Avoid plastic tubes.
The end of the tubes needs to seal up to prevent light or air from filtering in through the back of the hole. A secure hole is more inviting to a mother bee.
Make sure replacement liner straws are available for future years.

You want lots of holes close together because even though these bees are solitary, they are gregarious and like nesting near each other. It’s a condo-consciousness lifestyle. Come spring, set your bee habitat up on the sunny wall of a building where it will receive direct sunlight but be protected from wind and rain. Placing it on a building is one of the best ways to insure your success. The bees need the extra warmth and wind/rain protection provided by a building with it’s girth and overhanging eves. Bee homes set on posts or fences or hung from trees are almost certainly guaranteed to fail.

If you are one of the lucky people you may be able to attract mason bees to your garden simply by providing them habitat. If you are one of the rest of us, be assured that mason bees can be purchased by many of the same places that supply nesting habitat. Mason bees can only be shipped during their dormant period so expect be able to purchase starter colonies of bees only from fall to late winter.

There are thousands of native bees in North America, many of which lay their eggs in holes in a similar way to masons. You can use the same process we did with masons to provide habitat for many other species of bees. One of my favorite activities with children is to take a clean block of wood and let the kids drill lots of different sized holes in it. We begin at about ½ inch and work our way all the way down to 1/8 inch. Hang this block out on the same good sunny wall and see who shows up. There are thousands of little native bees that nest in holes. It is a fun experiment for the children to see what kinds of bees are in your garden and what seasons the different species prefer. In my garden we get multiple species and I have collected samples from many different bees.

The second part of creating a pollinator garden is to provide food for your guests. Some species of bees are very specific about what they will eat and pollinate, others are generalists. There are areas of this country where one type of plant may have one and only one type of insect who pollinates it. This leaves both the plant and the insect highly at risk for extinction. Just a small disruption of either the climate or environment can eliminate both in a very short amount of time.

Fortunately for us as home gardeners, many pollinators are much less specific about what they want to eat. Mason bees will feed on almost anything in bloom during the early spring. They will live on early spring bulbs like crocus, or the dandelions popping up through the lawn. Many trees set prodigious amounts of pollen in the early spring. Fruit trees are obvious to most of us but others like Big Leaf Maples are an even more important part of my gardens early food supply for my bees. Pieris, which is a large family of flowering shrubs with members ranging from ground huggers to small trees, offers early food to many of the mason bees and other early pollinators in my garden. Other bees like Osmia californica, a later season cousin to the Orchard Mason bee, will pick a general family of plants to feed from. Californicas have a special interest in plants of the compositae family. This family includes sunflowers and daisies. I see them thick as thieves on my dahlias every summer.

Since we want to provide food for as many varieties of pollinating bees as possible in our gardens, you will want to plant a wide variety of plants with various bloom times and flower shapes. Try to get a mix that ensures that there is something for everyone, all season long. My spring garden consists of fruit trees, blueberries, bulbs, heather, primroses, roses, maple trees, periwinkle, currents, crabapple trees, and peonies. As the seasons progress the later blooms emerge including dahlias, asters, crocosmia, sedum, grasses, tomatoes, squash, and herbs.

One of the best ways to insure you have a plentiful supply of blooms is to visit your local nursery on a regular basis all throughout the growing season. If you frequent the nursery only during the spring, you will find primarily spring flowering plants. If you go stop visiting nurseries by late summer, many of the spectacular fall bloomers will miss your eye and subsequently your garden. It takes regular visits to insure that you have the widest variety of blooms possible. It will add great interest and beauty to your garden as well as insure that your garden is an attractive home for native pollinators. Working together we can help to bring back the bees.

Creating a Pollination Friendly Garden with Native Bees

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Creating a Pollination Friendly Garden with Native Bees

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