in defense of bees

A lot of nurs­eries around here tout plants as being hum­ming­bird– or butterfly-friendly. Those lit­tle crit­ters are awfully dec­o­ra­tive and fun to have around, but the major work of pol­li­na­tion belongs to the bees. For instance the Cal­i­for­nia almond crop sup­plies some­thing like 80% of the world’s almond exports, and the crop wouldn’t be pos­si­ble with­out all the hives that are trucked into the Cen­tral Val­ley about this time of year. Accord­ing to the Los Ange­les Times, farm­ers now are spend­ing more on rent­ing hives than they are on water­ing their trees.

A recent arti­cle, The Headbonker’s Ball, in Orion Mag­a­zine has a great arti­cle on the Urban Bee Project, a project headed by UC Berke­ley prof Gor­don Frankie that’s designed to edu­cate folks about the value of hav­ing bee-friendly gar­dens. Their Urban Bee Gar­dens site crawls with all sorts of infor­ma­tion on the value of bees and what you can do to wel­come them into your gar­den. Some of it’s under con­struc­tion still, but there’s already lots of use­ful infor­ma­tion there.

One of the cores of the site is a list of plants that are friendly to bees, and the list is bro­ken into spring plants and sum­mer plants so that you can plan a pro­gres­sion of food sources for the lit­tle guys. The list is a lit­tle Berkeley-centric, though many of the plants on the list would grow plenty of other places. At first you might worry that you’d have to plant odd­ball ugly plants just to the do the right thing, but incor­po­rat­ing bee-friendly plants requires no such thing. A lot of the selec­tions are really com­mon gar­den plants, and you prob­a­bly have a num­ber of them in your gar­den already: laven­ders, pen­ste­mons, salvias, cos­mos, sun­flow­ers, and the like.

With all the plants out there the list couldn’t pos­si­bly list every bee-friendly plant out there.Various thymes, for instance, have a rep­u­ta­tion for being major bee party pads. The Berke­ley project came to its con­clu­sions by send­ing peo­ple out into gar­dens and hav­ing them count how many bees vis­ited a plant in a cer­tain time period. (Not a bad way to con­duct research, eh?) You could do the same. If there’s some­thing not on the list but you notice that the bees like it, why not plant a lit­tle more of it? Give the hum­ming­birds and but­ter­flies some company.

March 28 2008 12:14 pm | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: • •

One Response to “in defense of bees”

  1. Elizabeth on 29 Mar 2008 at 3:40 am #

    Lots of bees on the roof in Mar­rakech.
    Luck­ily I’ve yet to be stung.

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