Flat-faced flowers such as dahlias are the bee’s knees to pollinators.
Photo by L.A. Jackson
Want to attract more bees into your garden? Below are tips and plant suggestions to help make your growing spaces more bee-coming for these beneficial buzzers.
Go wild. Bees naturally love native plants, and many from the wild can also double as pleasant visual additions to cultivated landscapes. Including indigenous eye-catchers such as foxglove, yarrow, liatris, goldenrod, ironweed, turtlehead, Joe Pye weed, penstemon, swamp milkweed, purple coneflower, salvia, coral honeysuckle, black-eyed Susans or gaillardia is a good way to enjoy a two-fer—beauty and the bees.
The right rose. Not all roses are rosy for bees. For instance, if a rose isn’t fragrant, it has less appeal to bees, and if its petals are tight and closed, bees can’t get into it, so single-flowered and semi-double selections are better. Also, many modern cultivars are long on looks while short in pollen production, but species roses are more bee-friendly in this department.
Flat note. Being busy, bees would rather not spend their time maneuvering in and through a blossom to get at its pollen-laden center. That’s why they buzz at the sight of flowers with flat faces such as dahlias, zinnias, Queen Anne’s lace, daisies, sunflowers, cosmos, marigolds and asters.
Make scents. Like people, bees are attracted to sweet smells, so think about adding nose-pleasing flowers such as forget-me-nots, heliotrope, nasturtium, phlox, four o’clocks, soapwort or nicotiana. Blooming herbs can be helpers as well, especially pleasantly scented ones like hyssop, basil, rosemary, sage, catnip, lavender, borage, chamomile, thyme and marjoram.
Color their world. Bees are attracted to certain hues, with yellow being their favorite, followed by blue, purple and white. Interestingly, bees are colorblind when it comes to red—to them, it’s a shadowy black that fades into the surrounding foliage. However, some plants with red blooms have ultraviolet coloring mixed in, making them appear to be an agreeable blue to bees. These include pansies, corn poppy and bee balm.
Bee safe. Why invite bees into your garden and then kill them? Go easy on using broad-spectrum insecticides that nuke anything with six legs. Systemic pesticides can also make flowers poisonous to bees. Contact insecticides, when sprayed directly only on unwanted insects late in the day when bee activity is at a minimum, are a better option if you must resort to bug-boppers. Actually, a sharp squirt of water from the garden hose will dispatch numerous bothersome creepy-crawlers.
May in the garden
• Air temperatures heat up much faster than ground temps. That’s why you should hold off mulching around new annual plantings until at least the middle to end of this month. This will allow the sun to warm your garden’s soil up to more comfy temperatures that will help stimulate stronger root growth.
• Rising temperatures this month also mean it’s prime time to add heat-loving bulbs such as caladiums, cannas, dahlias and gladioli to the ornamental garden.
Tip of the month
Whether mild flavored or unholy hot, peppers are one of the more popular veggies grown by home gardeners. Many selections can now be found locally as transplants or seeds, but also check out peppers from these South Carolina-based online retailers for the odd, the unusual, the insanely scorching:
- Seeds ’n Such, Graniteville (seedsnsuch.com).
- Park Seed, Hodges (parkseed.com).
- PuckerButt Pepper Company, Fort Mill (puckerbuttpeppercompany.com).
Want one more option? My “secret” e-source for both cutting-edge pepper research and cultivar intros is the Chile Pepper Institute (cpi.nmsu.edu) in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
L.A. Jackson is the former editor of Carolina Gardener magazine. Contact him at lajackson1@gmail.com.