With honey bees disappearing from hives around the world and native bee habitats turning into developed spaces, it’s time to do your part at home to help protect our bees. Building a bee garden is one of the easiest ways to help native bees, and it’s a fun project too! Here’s how you can design your very own pollinator garden.

Define Your Space

The first step in planning your new garden is to select a site. The best garden site receives at least six hours of sun a day, has loose, rich soil, and is near a water source. If neighbors spray herbicides or insecticides on their lawn, choose a site away from the property border.

Homeowners may choose to dedicate an area of the backyard to wildlife or turn the front yard landscaping into a pollinator habitat. Gardeners in a smaller space have to be a little more creative, but can still find space for a container garden on a patio, balcony, or even in windowboxes.

Pick the Best Plants

Choosing plants for a bee garden is much different than deciding on plants for traditional landscaping or vegetable gardens. Pollinator gardens rely on perennial plants and diverse flowers to attract and feed bees throughout the spring, summer, and fall each year. However, the flowers you’d plant in a traditional garden aren’t always suitable for a pollinator garden. Bees can’t access the pollen in flowers with a complex structure, such as double-flowered varieties, and these types often produce little nectar. Instead, opt for simpler wildflowers that bring an understated beauty to the garden.

Plants like sunflowers, borage, wild lilac, echinacea, bee balm, and goldenrod are all popular with foraging bees. Adding native plants into the mix ensures you reach the widest variety of local bee species.

Incorporate Edible Plants

Don’t limit your bee garden to flowers alone. Planting edible plants alongside shrubs and flowers attracts more bees and gives you a passive food source. Bees will love dining on the blooms of apple, plum, and cherry trees, while blackberries and strawberries offer a food source on the lower canopy. Adding herbs like dill, lavender, rosemary, and basil provides you flavor through the spring and nectar to the bees when the plants flower. Herbs are also a great way to have a small balcony garden pull double-duty as a kitchen garden and pollinator garden.

Factor in Water and Shelter

Along with flowering plants to forage, bees need water and shelter before they can make your garden their home. Incorporate a water source into your garden design. In big gardens, this could be a small pond or fountain. In smaller spaces, a birdbath or another small basin of water does the trick without taking up much real estate.

Creating shelter for bees may sound intimidating, but it’s the easiest step in building a bee-friendly garden. Unlike honey bees, most native bee species live underground or in cavities in trees and reeds. So while you are free to become a backyard beekeeper, shelter in your bee garden requires little more than a patch of bare earth and a few dead branches. If you’d like to take it up a notch, or you’re working with a small space incompatible with natural shelter, you can also build simple bee boxes that offer a home to native mason bees.

Prep, Plant, and Enjoy

Once your design is worked out, it’s time to get your hands dirty. Clear grass and weeds from your garden plot and lightly turn the soil so it’s ready for transplants and seeds. If you’re transplanting, ensure your plants haven’t been treated with pesticides and that you’ve purchased them in the proper planting season. If you’re growing from seed, just follow the directions on the packet for the proper planting time, seed depth, and spacing. Water regularly to help the plants become established, but ease off supplemental watering as they mature. At the end of each season, you can either collect seeds to plant next year or let them fall naturally into the soil to reseed. As the years go by, your garden will grow into a lush environment and an important part of your local ecosystem.

 

by Christy Erickson (SavingOurBees.org)

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Christy Erickson is the founder of Savingourbees. Her aim is to collect and distribute the most accurate and up-to-date resources on the bee crisis and information on how to help in the community.