You Can Help the Native Bees-They’re Our Best Pollinators

Pollinators are in rapid decline. They have their mission from Mother Earth to pollinate between 75 and 90% of all the plants on earth. This is to make seeds for more plants. And fruits and nuts for animals and for us humans.

The pollinators and all the other insects are in decline worldwide. The two most significant causes? Loss of habitat and pesticide use.

And just who are the pollinators? The majority of the pollinators are bees, but the list also includes wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, bats, and birds (mostly hummingbirds in North America) and even a few ants. 

But when we think of bees, most people think of the honey bee. It was imported from Europe.

Native bees don’t get much attention                    

 But there are around 4,000 native bees in North America.  California has about 1600 species of native bees.  These bees are in decline just like the honey bee and need every bit of our help.

 Native bees are typically much more efficient and faster pollinators than honey bees

A study was done that determined that only 250 female blue orchard bees were needed to pollinate an acre of apples that would have required two hives of honey bees, with 15,000 to 20,000 honey bees each.

The native bees don’t need to be kept by us but they need good nesting sites, a good supply of flowers throughout the growing season, and no pesticides.

Provide nesting sites

Most of the native bees are solitary.  They usually live for one year.  The female spends her whole adult life building a nest and storing provisions for her young.  Many nests are in the ground.  Some are tunneled into dead wood. 

Once the nest is ready for provisioning she forages the flowers and gathers nectar and pollen which she mixes and forms into a loaf and stores into each cell prepared for each egg she lays.  Then she dies and her young emerge the following spring.

Nesting sites for wild bees include dead logs and twigs.  So leaving a few piles of fallen twigs around, and a dead log or two will provide some bee habitat.  Leave them out well before spring so that new emerging bees will find them for their new nests.  Crevices in rocks and rock walls provide habitat.

Some bees nest in the spent stems of flowers. At the end of the season flower stems of Rudbeckia, Echinacea, sunflowers, and others can be left standing, offering nesting sites for bees and seeds for birds.  Wait until spring to cut them back, cut at the bottom, and keep them in a loose pile for a while to assure the new bees have safely emerged.

You may even find some holes in the side of the stems where the young bees have emerged!

Many bees tunnel into in and nest in compacted, bare dirt so be sure not to mulch everything!  Leave some dirt pathways or open space free of mulch. You may find little holes in the ground…and you might be able to catch sight of a bee leaving or entering its nest!

Have plenty of flowers on hand

Keeping a garden with a wide range of flowers on trees, shrubs, and perennial and annual flowers will help to supply the nectar and pollen the native bees need.  Since the native bees evolved with native plants, these are the most ideal plants to select.  A few of my favorite shrubs are Toyon, Coffeeberry, Manzanitas, Red Flowering Currant, and the Cleveland Sages, in my area in the Sierra foothills. Many flowers will work and there are lists of suitable plants you can find online…see below.

The goal is to have flowers throughout the season for a steady supply of pollen and nectar and your flower garden and herb garden can be of great help! Just be sure your plants are grown fron neo-nicotinoid-free plants and even seeds! More seed suppliers and nursery suppliers are heeding this need, so look for signage or ask your nursery person about it. Otherwise, there are many small, specialty and organic growers that offer plants without the “neo-nics” applied.

Team up with neighbors to enhance your efforts

Try to team up with others in your neighborhood to provide forage flowers for the bees.  It has been shown that the bee populations are larger and more diverse in areas that have many small gardens nearby rather than isolated gardens.  But everything helps!

Keep your landscape pesticide-free

Bees need to live in an environment free of pesticides.  The neonicotinoids have been very strongly suspected of doing damage to bee populations.  Use plants that are free of this insecticide.  The chemical imidicloprid is a neonicotinoid that is often used as a systemic insecticide.  Once inside the plant it can affect bees for a long time.

 You may live in an ecologically rich area and it may be hard to think of habitat loss as something you should worry about.  But if you look at the big picture, in the United States, landscape ecologists have deduced that we have changed, paved over, built upon, and replanted with exotic ornamentals and crop plants a good 95% of our land in the lower 48 states.  That leaves only 5% of native lands and those are fragmented and scattered.  So we can and should look at our own landscapes and gardens as a place to truly help support and increase the bee and other pollinator populations.

Come early spring when the manzanita opens its flowers in February in my area, I love to take some time to see the amazing variety of bees.  Throughout the warm flowering season you may observe mason bees, bumble bees, carpenter bees, sweat bees, the ultra-green sweat bees, the tiny little blue ‘Jewel bee’, and many other bees that have only scientific names.

Some of these flying insects may not even be bees but, instead, are flies that look like bees in order to scare away predators. And some bees are so tiny you may overlook them. They won’t go after you. In fact I have walked through and harvested bunches and bunches of lavender with honey bees buzzing all about. I never got stung! And the native bees are much more tolerant.

Here’s where to learn more

I have just barely begun to try to learn the different bees, and I now have my new bee guide, The Bees in Your Backyard by Joseph S. Wilson and Olivia Messinger Carril, to learn more.  This book gives lots of information on creating habitat and even houses and nests to build for some of the bees, in addition to identifying all the bees.  There is another new book out called California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists by Frankie, Thorp, Coville, and Ertter, for Californians. There’s a lot of information online from great sources such as the Xerces Society, university entomology departments, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and so on.  Type in “wild bee pollinators” to get you started. Here’s a link to the UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab.