How to Attract Bees in Your Garden

By now it’s not news that bees are essential for the food we consume, and without them, we would be lost (and dead). It’s also not news that if you’re trying to grow some of your food or keep your yard looking spiffy, not sending these ladies an invitation means there won’t be any garden party at all. By learning how to attract bees in your garden, you play an active role in the health of your garden, community, and world.

Location, Location, Location

Thankfully the old real estate advice doesn’t involve moving to a better location, just a little revamping. By altering our gardens and outdoor spaces, we signal to pollinators through visual and olfactory cues that they are welcome.

Have you ever seen nature make perfect rows of vegetables, or space every flower exactly 6 inches apart like the instructions on the seed packet say to do? There is nothing natural about how we tend to space our gardens, and according to a lot of research about what humans find most attractive, we don’t even find it all that appealing. We think biodiversity is sexy and so does every other animal, insect, and microbe. The best thing you can do to promote a healthy pollinator population, let things get a little wild!

Group flowers together with a variety of colors, heights, and bloom times. Just as we eat different fruits and veggies based on the times they are available, bees need a variety of flowers to feast on throughout the whole time they are active. The flowers that make the biggest impact on your bee populations are the early bloomers. By choosing at least a few flowers that bloom in the early spring when the first bee generations are emerging, you can encourage them to nest close by because they have access to food. You’ll still need suitable nesting sites for them, but we will cover that shortly.

Avoid leaving a ton of ground uncovered that you’ll have to mulch over to make it look less naked. You don’t want to crowd your plants but use your space!! I think some people don’t want their gardens to look busy, but I, for one, have never seen a garden plot and thought “Gee, there’s way too many flowers!”

The First Nursery Haul of the Season

Nothing quite compares to the feeling of loading up on tons of baby plants after a whole season of dormancy. I always walk into the nursery full of anticipation for what my garden will be like this year. Gardening really is an art in that the garden can look so different from year to year based on the choices of the gardener.

Before you pull over on a whim because you see the first garden center open for the season, it’s important to be mindful of where you’re getting your plants. Understanding how to attract bees in your garden also means understanding what could harm them.

One significant study was published by the Pesticide Research Institute in collaboration with Friends of the Earth in 2014. The research tested a variety of plants, including flowers commonly sold at major garden centers across 18 locations in the U.S. and Canada. The findings showed that over half of the sampled plants were contaminated with neonicotinoids (neonics), a class of pesticides linked to bee population declines.

In my experience and in my area, there aren’t many organic nurseries and the labeling on plants in the nurseries isn’t very descriptive. Talk with the owners and workers about where they source their plants and practices. Letting them know you care about the use of pesticides might spark change in who they source from. At the very least it lets them know there is a market for organic seedlings.

Plant Breeding: the inverse relationship of what humans and bees find attractive

Another thing to keep in mind while browsing the nursery is hybrid plants. Many cultivars are bred to have the showiest petals and the most vibrant colors possible. While these make for attractive flowers in the eyes of humans, they are usually useless or the flower of last resort in the eyes and noses of the bees. This is because flowers employ complex pathways that determine the composition and presence of nectar and pollen. When flowers are bred for certain traits like double petals as seen in many marigold cultivars, it happens at the expense of the nectar and pollen.

Bees also don’t perceive color the way humans do. Like so many other things in the world, light is a spectrum! Humans see the red-violet section of this spectrum. Bees aren’t able to see the red end of the spectrum, but they can see blue all the way to ultraviolet!

In ultraviolet, many flowers show bees exactly where the nectar resides. This doesn’t mean color doesn’t matter in attracting bees to your garden. Just know it’s not in the same way that you perceive the flowers.

I’m certainly not asking you to give up your preferences, but knowing that your favorite cultivars are most likely just for their looks and won’t offer much benefit to pollinators. This can help you make decisions about how to attract bees in your garden. There will be plants you’re selecting for yourself and plants you’re selecting for the bees.

Natives!!

Most bees are going to opt for native plants, so even if you are mindful of buying cultivars, the best plants are the plants the bees know and love. Just as we tend to keep a special place in our hearts for the foods we grew up with, bees have a preference for the flowers they grew up with and evolved alongside.

Flowers and bees have an incredibly special coevolution. Through this incredibly long relationship, they ended up selecting certain characteristics in each other. It’s a useful bit of information to know that some bees are generalists while others are specialists.

Our generalists aren’t picky eaters and will feast on a variety of flowers. These are Honey bees, bumble bees, many species of sweat bees and carpenter bees, and certain species of mining bees. The specialists are a different story; they won’t touch all but a very select few flowers that are from the same family or genus, sometimes even being so picky as to eat off only a few species! The benefit to this is that they are incomparable in their ability to pollinate their favorite food. This is the case for squash bees (tribe Eucerini) who only pollinate flowers in the Cucurbita genus – pumpkins, squash, and gourds.

The Xerces Society has a Pollinator Conservation Resource Center that allows you to select your region. A list of links will populate that have native plant lists and the pollinators they attract. It’s a fabulous tool for finding plants suitable to your area that will attract bees in your garden. Access the resource center here.

Size Matters: Tongue Edition

Bees are sometimes classified based on tongue length. The size of bee doesn’t necessarily correlate with the size of its tongue. For example, the burly bumble is only a medium-tongued bee despite being one of the largest bees. This is something to pay attention to because the nectaries of different flowers are located at different lengths within the flower. It’s important to not only have a variety of types and colors of flowers. They should have different structures so that all bees can access them.

Short-Tongued Bees

• Honeybees (Apis spp.): Honeybees have relatively short tongues and are well-adapted to visiting a wide range of flowers, particularly those with accessible nectar. They are generalists and can forage on flowers with shorter corollas.
• Bumblebees (Bombus spp.): Bumblebees also have shorter tongues compared to some other bees. They are versatile foragers and can visit a variety of flowers, but they are especially effective on flowers with moderate depths.

Medium-Tongued Bees

• Mining Bees (Andrena spp.): Many mining bees have intermediate tongue lengths. They often specializon certain flower types but can access flowers with moderate corolla lengths.
• Leafcutter Bees (Megachile spp.): These bees have medium tongues and can forage on a diverse array of flowers, including those with moderately deep nectar spurs.

Long-Tongued Bees

• Orchid Bees (Euglossini tribe): Orchid bees are known for their exceptionally long tongues, which they use to access nectar from deep-throated flowers like orchids. They are specialized in visiting flowers with long corollas.
• Long-Tongued Solitary Bees (e.g., some species of Colletes and Anthophora): These solitary bees have long tongues that enable them to forage on flowers with deep nectar spurs, including certain tubular flowers and specialized blooms.

Nesting Sites

Providing nesting sites for ground and cavity-nesting bees could be the missing link in how to attract bees in your garden. An abundance of flowers will certainly provide food, but without a home to take it all back to the bees may not be close by enough to appreciate the feast you’ve set out for them.

Some of the most valuable advice I could offer about how to attract bees in your garden revolves around where the bees call home. The majority of bees are solitary, ground-nesting bees. Their preferences vary from family to genus to species, but most will not turn their noses up at sandy, well draining soil in a sunny location. They won’t nest in places with vegetation. As empty as a bare patch of sand might look, it allows the space for these ladies to bring it to life.

Upon arriving on my garden scene a bit late one year, an entire aggregation of Agepostemon had claimed a bare patch of the garden. It was one of the most exciting things to watch. Around 25-35 little bees buzzed around at all times of the day, looking for their own entrance among the entrances of all the other mum bees in the vicinity. I even had the privilege of watching a few cuckoo bees trying to sneak their way into other bees nests to lay their eggs.

Other Resources

The National Wildlife Federation has a tool called the Native Plant Finder. Put in your zip code, and the program spits out a list of plants native to your area. They are a more butterfly-focused agency, but a quick internet search can tell you if any of the plants that look interesting to you are also interesting to bees. Access the tool here.

Final Thoughts

By learning how to attract bees in your garden, you’re doing way more than just making your landscape beautiful for you. By welcoming pollinators, you are benefiting your neighbors and the community at large. You conserve and protect these important and threatened invertebrates, and contribute to the biodiversity of your space.

You are a true citizen scientist and future generations of both bees and humans rely on these contributions! Beyond buying pesticide-free seeds and plants, planting a diversity of colors, sizes, and shapes, and providing nesting space for these little guests, sharing this information is another vital contribution. Your homework is to tell a friend about the exciting world of bees and how you’ve learned how to attract bees in your garden so they can participate.