Bees often inhabit bird houses. By planting nectar-producing flowers and plants, gardeners provide inviting habitat for endangered wild honeybee populations.
Plant flowers, fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and shun pesticides. Choose a variety of flowers and plants than bloom throughout the early spring, summer, and fall. During winter, honey bees live on stored honey made from the nectar they collected throughout the other seasons. See Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen's February 16, 2010 article, "Gardening for Honey Bees," for specific flower planting recommendations throughout the year.
Non-Contact Beekeeping or Wild Bee Stewardship
Honey bees need all the help urban, suburban, and rural gardeners can provide. With the addition of imported European honey bees to pollinate large temporary crops, native North American honey bees compete for nectar sufficient to meet their overwintering needs. Importing non-native bees, as well as increasing use of pesticides may contribute to "colony collapse disorder" and a general decline in honey bee populations.
Wild bee stewards don't harvest honey from bees. Rather, they support bees in exchange for pollination services in the garden. Gardeners who welcome and support honey bees will notice improved productivity and health of plants.
Bird Houses for Honey Bees
Wild honeybees typically nest in dead trees, natural hollows, or under ground. They frequently inhabit bird houses, which simulate tree hollows. Gardeners who prefer for birds to inhabit bird houses can place extra bird houses (for the bees) nearer the flowers and plants to draw bees away from bird nesting boxes placed higher in trees.
For bees that prefer underground dens, placement of frog houses and practices such as "sheet composting" or "lasagna gardening," which forgo disturbing the ground through tilling, provide safe and inviting garden grounds for bees.
Your garden might also be home to solitary mason bees. If it isn't you can make it more welcoming by providing nesting and forage.
Facts About Honey Bees
Honey bees refine and concentrate flower nectar to create honey, which they save and eat over the winter when flower nectar is not available. Eating honey during the winter helps the bees to keep from freezing to death.
To protect their honey from thieves, honey bees have a weapon at the end of their abdomen: a stinger made from a modified egg-laying tube combined with a venom sac. Male honey bees don't have egg-laying tubes, so they cannot sting.
Honeybees see the world through compound eyes, each made of hundreds of small simple eyes. See the world through the eyes of a bee.
Honeybees work together. In the wild, they create hives containing up to 20,000 bees, divided into 3 castes: a queen, up to a hundred drones, and thousands of workers. The queen is bigger than the others. She lays up to 1,500 eggs per day, which is her only job. Her curved stinger has no barbs, so she can sting many times. She lives two to eight years.
Drones have no stingers, because they're all males. They live only about eight weeks. Drones have bigger eyes than the other bees. They mate with the queen. At the end of the season, the other bees drive them out of the hive and they die.
Workers do most of the work to keep the hive going. Most honey bees are workers, and they're all female so they can sting and defend the hive. Younger workers stay in the "house" and do housework (comb building and repair, etc.). Older workers go out into the field to collect nectar, pollen, water, and certain sticky plant resin for hive building.
Workers have "pollen baskets" on their hind legs, an extra stomach for carrying nectar or honey, and special beeswax glands on the undersides of their abdomens. They can use their straight, barbed stingers only once and then they die from losing it.
The more gardeners know about honey bees, they better they can meet bees' needs and reap the benefits of bee occupation in the garden. The organic garden with honey bees flourishes and the gardener promotes a future of bees and sustainable wildlife garden habitats.
Sara McGrath - Sara is a veteran homeschool mom of three, Usborne consultant, and the author of Unschooling: A Lifestyle of Learning.
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