Invite pollinators to enjoy your garden

Plant zinnias, milkweed, lavender, clover, apple trees, hummingbird mint, butterfly bushes—and pollinators will arrive.

Honeybees get major credit for pollinating crops and flowers, but they don’t work alone. Other bees, flies, wasps, moths, butterflies, beetles and hummingbirds are major workers.

Some are generalists, able to pollinate a variety of plant species; others have developed specialized partnerships such as a single wasp species which pollinates a fig tree.

Honeybees carry pollen on their legs, but most native bees collect it on numerous body hairs and as they visit plant after plant, pollen is more easily brushed off. This assures more complete pollination than what happens with honeybees.

Without these helpers, dozens and dozens of commercial crops in the U.S. would perhaps fail. We are fortunate, though, that more than 3,000 species of native bees aid crop pollination. Honeybees, by the way, are not native.

Each of us can help:

Plant flowers and trees, especially natives, so pollinators find nectar and nutritious pollen from early spring through autumn months. In addition to ones noted above, consider bee balm, asters, mockorange, columbine, serviceberry trees, coneflowers.

Decrease the size of your lawn. Where there are large expanses, pollinators (birds, too) hesitate to travel a distance from a safe spot to another place.

Provide water even if it is simply a bowl with a stone in the middle as a landing pad. Keep the bowl clean.

Build or buy nest houses. With a drill you can cut holes of various sizes in a block of untreated wood for borer bees. Not all need a structure. Burrowing bees may build a home in leaf litter, and they need areas of soil with no debris and leaves.

Avoid insecticides, which kill bees directly, and herbicides, which kill the plants which bees depend on. Especially avoid systemic insecticides. Plant vascular systems take them up and expose bees to poison long after the chemicals are applied.

Plant flowers among your vegetables. Their blooms will attract pollinators which then will visit the vegetable blossoms.
Some native pollinators depend on native plants, and more and more they must deal with threats: climate change, invasive species, growing urban development, loss of crop acreage.
Few moths move about in daytime hours. You may see some at dusk but most are nocturnal, seeking nectar at night. Consider planting a few white flowers which are more easily seen in dark hours: white clematis, hydrangeas, peonies, cleome, impatiens.
Apple trees are blooming now. Walk near one, watch for several minutes and prepare to be amazed at the number of pollinators, in various sizes and shapes, probing the blossoms. You may see few honeybees.

Sharon Daniels is a Virginia Cooperative Extension Master Gardener volunteer.