Plants & Pollination
Growing Early Flowering Plants for Bees
Add to Favorites For most gardeners, fall is the time to bring in the last of the harvest, preserve and store what you’ve harvested, and put the garden to bed …
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Why Are There Flower Particles on my Bottom Board?
When we see flower parts stuck to bees, it’s usually the pollenia of either milkweeds or orchids. The pollenia are pollen-filled sacks that stick to the pollinator like glue and eventually fall off on another flower. Honey bees are most apt to engage with milkweed pollenia, and sometimes they have so many long and stringy orange sacks hanging from their legs they can barely fly.
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What’s Bothering My Mason Bees?
The parasitic wasp genus Monodontomerus shows up just as the mason bee season is coming to a close. The wasps are very tiny, perhaps fruit fly size, and fly with a nervous, side-to-side pattern that makes them look guilty.
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A List of Plants That Attract Bees
For thousands of years, bees have been helping feed people, but now in the face of an onslaught of chemicals and disease, they’re in need of a helping hand. One course of action you can take is growing plants that attract bees.
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What do Mason Bees Pollinate?
Most Osmia mason bees are generalist pollinators, foraging on a wide variety of plants. As a rule of thumb, Osmia prefer tube-shaped blossoms or flowers with irregular shapes. Some of their favorites are various mints, penstemon, scorpionweed, and willows. They also like legume family plants such as indigo bush, clover, and vetch along with composites such as thistles.
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65 Pollinator-Friendly Plants Bees Love
Add to Favorites Beekeepers are investing a lot of time and money seeking a solution to the bee population decline, but in the meantime, gardeners can be the frontline troops in …
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Why We Need to Protect Native Pollinator Habitat
Add to Favorites Doug Ottinger – Regardless of whether we live a rural lifestyle, an urban one, or something in between, our existence, and continuance of the world as we …
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Should You Feed Native Bees?
Add to Favorites Do you know if the sugar water will work for wild bees as well? I haven’t undertaken starting my own hive, but I usually have quite a …
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