Attract Native Pollinators to Your Garden

Enlarge Image Image Gallery "Attracting Native Pollinators" shows how to encourage the activity of pollinators other than honeybees, which are on decline in North America. You'll find comprehensive information on every kind of pollinator, instructions for building nesting structures and an extensive list of resources. Photo Courtesy Storey Publishing

The following is an excerpt from Attracting Native Pollinators: Protecting North America's Bees and Butterflies by The Xerces Society (Storey, 2011). The excerpt is from Chapter 5: Strategies to Help Pollinators. 

Critical Mass of Habitat 

Although many pollinating insects can adapt to changing conditions and often rebound from the effects of natural changes in their environment — including fires, floods, droughts, and windstorms — it’s impossible to protect a diversity of pollinators without a critical mass of diverse habitats. That critical mass is being lost in many landscapes.

Not only is there less natural habitat than ever before, but the land that surrounds it may also be inhospitable to pollinators because it lacks food plants or nesting sites. In rural areas, the fields created by large-scale agriculture are too big for some bee species to cross to reach forage or nests. Tilling can destroy shallow bee nests or block the emergence of bees deeper in the ground. The crops grown on many farms are wind-pollinated members of the Grass family (wheat, corn, rice, grass, barley, oats, and so on) and have no value as bee forage, while those crops that do offer nectar and pollen usually provide them only in a brief, though abundant, burst.

In urban areas, landscapes around developments tend to be dominated by easy-to-maintain lawns and shrubs chosen for their colorful foliage rather than for their flowers. When there are flowers, often they are nonnative plants or highly ornamental varieties that provide little or no food value for native pollinators.

You can improve these conditions where you live if you consciously plan, create, and maintain habitat patches — the bigger the better — in urban, suburban, and rural areas. We can plant a diversity and abundance of nectar- and pollen-laden native plants, we can provide nesting habitat, and we can choose not to use pesticides, or at least exercise extreme caution.