It’s garden time and one of the most important aspects of a successful garden is making sure your vegetables and fruit get pollinated. Apples, watermelons, squash, cucumbers and strawberries are just a few fruits and vegetables that rely on happy bees to pollinate them. Some insects and birds can serve as pollinators too, but honey bees carry the biggest job. So here on our little farm we make sure our bees are happy.
There are three areas we concentrate to help keep the bees in our garden.
- Plant lots of flowers that our bees use as sugars and proteins from the nectar and pollen in the flowers. They need these to grow healthy and reproduce.
- Dill, Parsley, Black-Eyes Susan, Sunflower, Purple Coneflower and Aster are just a few of the flowers I keep in my flower garden each year.
- Provide shelter for our bees far away from local foot traffic and close to a water source. Our hive boxes sit in a sunny location at the edge of our back pasture.
- Don’t use insecticides that would kill our bees. We rely on our bees to do our pollinating for us and treat them just like we treat our farm animals. We control pests in our garden by hand-picking and all-natural solutions for pest control.
Take a walk through your garden and look for bees. Be concerned is you don’t see bees hopping from plant to plant on a sunny calm day. If you don’t see many bees you will need to hand pollinate each plant or find a bee-keeper to move a hive or two to a spot close to your garden.
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I think my bees are happy…. they have already been working hard here. 🙂 We do have many of the things you listed. 🙂
Living in SoCal, I keep bees happy all year round, and am doing some of the things you list, however, I don’t keep bees in our dense neighborhood. There are many wild bees in the Late Bloomer garden from dawn till dusk so I know they live somewhere near. I try to keep fresh water available especially important with our drought, but never see them drink. – Kaye
The only bees I see in my garden are the large bumblebees. But they do love my flowers in later spring. They arrived in early March this year and had to even wait for the daffodils. They love to roost overnight in the large yellow centers. – Margy
It’s so important for bees to have a place to live. We enjoy having all kinds of critters in our garden. I sometimes wonder if folks realize just how vital these little guys are to our world at large. I’d love for you to share this post on The Maple Hill Hop!