Are you planning a spring garden? Bees like diversity and do not care about neighbors’ yards

To reproduce, most flowering plants apply animals to carry pollen. In turn, pollinators feed on flowers, including both nectar and pollen. If you are a gardener, you can support this partnership by planting flowers. However, if you live in an area without a lot of green space, you may wonder if it’s worth the effort.

AND study bees and other pollinators. My new research shows that bees in particular do not care about the landscape surrounding flower gardens. They seem to focus on the specific types of flowers they like, no matter what else is nearby.

To design a garden that supports as many and diverse pollinators as possible, don’t worry about what your neighbors are or aren’t doing. Just focus on planting different types of flowers – lots of them.

Comparing different landscapes

To see if there are more bees in natural areas, My team and planted identical gardens – roughly 3 x 2 meters (10 feet by 6½ feet) – in five different landscapes in East Tennessee, ranging from cattle pastures and organic farms to a botanical garden and arboretum. All five gardens were planted in March 2019 and included 18 species of native perennials from the mint, sunflower and pea families.

During the flowering period, we observed pollinators, collecting insects that landed on the flowers so that we could count and identify them. Sampling was carried out in a carefully standardized manner. Every week we took five minutes to sample every flowering plant in every garden and landscape. We used a modified hand-held vacuum cleaner we called a “Bug Vac” and repeated sampling weekly for three years while the flowers were in bloom.

We wanted to check whether the area immediately surrounding the gardens – the flower district – has an impact on the number, diversity and identity of pollinators. So we also examined the area around the gardens for about 160 feet (about 50 meters).

To our surprise we found it the surrounding terrain had very little influence on the number, diversity and composition of pollinators arriving in our test gardens. Instead, they were mainly determined by the number and type of flowers. Otherwise, pollinators were remarkably similar at all sites. A sunflower in a cattle pasture had essentially the same number and type of visitors as a sunflower in a botanical garden.

Menu planning for pollinators

We used native perennial plants in our study because there is evidence to support this provide the best nutrition for insects visiting flowers. We chose one of three plant families because each offers different nutrients.

Plants from the mint family (Lamiaceae), For example, they provide a lot of sweet nectar and have easily accessible flowers that attract a wide range of insects. If you want to provide a huge and diverse group of insects with energy for flight, I recommend including plants from the mint family. If you live in Tennessee, examples include mountain mint, woodmint, and Cumberland rosemary. You can easily look for perennial plants comes from your area.

While some pollinators enjoy nectar, others get all their fat and protein from it eating only the pollen. Flowers from the sunflower family (Asteraceae), including asters and koreopsis, offer huge amounts of both pollen and nectar and also have very available flowers. Plants in this family are good for many pollinators, including many specialized beessuch as the blue-eyed long-horned bee (Melissodes denticulatus), which feeds mainly on seaweed (Vernonia fasciculata), also belonging to the sunflower family.

If you want to offer flowers with the highest protein content to feed the next generation of mighty pollinators, consider plants from the pea family (Fabaceae), such as dwarf indigo, false indigo, and bush clover. Some plants in this family do not even offer nectar as a reward. Instead, they provide pollen with a high protein content available only to the most effective pollinators. If you include plants from the pea family in your garden, you may see fewer visitors, but they will receive pollen with a high protein content.

A good start is to choose a few native perennials from each of these three families, all of which are widely available in garden centers. Just as a variety of foods is vital to human health, a mix of flower types provides pollinators with a varied and fit diet. Interestingly, the diversity of the human diet is directly linked to pollinators, as most of the color and diversity of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants.

Plant it and they will come

Maybe you’ve heard it insects worldwide are decreasing in terms of number and diversity. This issue is of particular concern for people whose crops are pollinated by insects and other animals. Pollinators actually face many threats, including: habitat loss due to pesticide exposure.

Fortunately, gardeners can provide these precious animals with incredible care by simply planting more flowers. As our research shows, compact patches of garden can stimulate pollinators – even if there are few resources for them in the surrounding landscape. The one constant in all our research is that insects love flowers. The more flowers and the more types of flowers, the more pollinators there will be on Earth.