Help Native Bees Thrive In Your Home Garden.
Add these edible plants to your veggie garden today!
These edible plants will encourage a range of native bees, plus honeybees to visit your garden. While it is never too late to start your garden, aim to plant as early in the season as possible and consider your specific climate zone with regards to when to plant.
Melons
Bees love squash flowers! Try watermelon, cucumber, sugar pumpkins, or any other type of culinary squash, like zucchini, that you like to eat. Bees visit the large squash blooms to collect nectar and pollen, and if you are lucky, you might find a bee snoozing inside a closed flower in the early morning.
Herbs
Cilantro, basil, sage, and rosemary are are great herbs to keep in the garden. Keep then in the ground or in a pot so that they are always on hand cooking. Native bees will be common visitors to all of these herbs.
Blooms
Plants from the sunflower family are highly attractive to native bees. Thistles, like artichokes, produce fuzzy purple and pink flowers that are a favorite of native bees. Sunchokes are easy to grow and you can eat the root bulbs in a variety of ways. Sunchokes grow ‘sunflower-esk’ flowers that can feed many different native bee species. Also consider edible flowers like ‘Oranges and Lemons’ (Gaillardia x grandiflora) or Cosmos sulfureus.
Photo by Loïc Mermilliod on Unsplash
More important things to consider:
- Do not use pesticides! This will kill pollinators and beneficial insects. However, if you are worried about garden pests, there are a number of natural pest control methods including integrative pest management (IPM) that use ecological principles to naturally combat any critters you don’t want in your garden.
- Use diverse array of plant species, with flowers of different colors, shapes and sizes. The more you mix it up, the more native bee species your garden can support. If you have the space for it, Include some flowering shrubs and native flowers to attract even more pollinators! Be sure to plant in patches with ‘like next to like’ to maximize pollination, and overlap planting so that blooms are available for native bees and you can observe pollinators in your garden year round.
- Build structure into your garden so that native bees can easily find and move between your plants. Keep the tallest plants go toward the back of the garden and short plants right up front. Also be sure leave a little space for native bees to build their nests. Many native bees are solitary nesters that use hollow stems, or dig tunnels under ground, or into piles of mulch to lay their eggs.
Share your questions, thoughts, and ideas for bee friendly gardens in the comments!
