We have Bee Gardens at Clark College and I love them. I love the beautiful flowers—but they weren’t designed for me. The colors, the nectar even the shapes of the flowers were designed to make bees like the flowers! The colors, shapes and the nectar reward are all evolutionarily designed to induce bees to visit the flowers and to unwittingly transfer pollen from the male part of one flower to the female part of another flower. All this beauty is to foster flower seed production.
And while I enjoy the beauty of the flowers, I also have come to enjoy seeing the many different species of bees on the flowers. If you establish a bee garden, you may attract over 30 bee species per day on your flowers. That’s more bee species in your yard than birders get when they put out bird seed!
Not only is a bee garden beautiful and helpful for hungry, native bees, but bee gardens are natural. And when you create natural habitat, you help hummingbirds, butterflies, some beetles, flower flies, and in turn, the birds that eat insects…in short, the most beneficial thing to do for an ecosystem is to create a bee garden because when you start low on the food chain—with insects—everything above the food chain benefits. I get a real satisfaction knowing that areas of Clark College—and areas of my own yard—are benefiting the ecosystem. And it all starts with a flower garden.
The first thing to do is find a place to make a garden. You might start small to keep everything easy in the first year. I have a Bee Garden at my home in the parking strip between the sidewalk and the street. It’s 40 feet long and 3 feet deep and bees love it—so do the neighbors.
Most grasses are non-native and they will dominate any flower seeds. There are several ways to get rid of grass. Here are several ideas:
The absolute best seeds are flower seeds that are native to the Pacific Northwest. Native means that those seeds have co-evolved with the native bee species of the Northwest and bees prefer these. All flowers have pollen, so even your non-native daffodils and apple trees benefit bees, but native flowers is a clear step above. Expect to pay more, but the native flowers will be appreciated by the hungry bees.
The best time to plant seeds is when the flowers themselves would naturally drop the seeds they produce—often in the fall. In our first year as a Bee Campus, we sowed our seeds at Clark in February. Very late! But they still bloomed (but we probably would have had more blooms had we sowed in the fall. November is a good time to sow because many plants have died back and there’s more exposed dirt. The new flower seeds love the months of cold, the rain, the occasional freeze—all those things boost germination rates.
If you have flowers in March (more likely in year two because perennials will pop up earlier than the seeds you sowed) you will get your first bees and they will probably be bumblebees. Bumblebees emerge from their winter nests earlier than other bees. By May, you will start to get more and more bees. The height of bees will probably be late June.
In October and November leave the garden natural. Let the leaves fall, let the plants decompose and enrich the soil. You can pull any non-native grasses that may have crept in. I usually add a few new flower seeds even though the existing flowers likely sprinkled their seeds on the ground for next year.
...two things are happening. First, the babies in the underground bee nests are maturing and will emerge in spring. Second, the seeds are undergoing slight changes that make them more likely to germinate in March. So even though the garden looks "dead", there are important things happening. Let them happen.
