Bees


 
Nearly six months ago, Jane and I set a dilapidated small dresser out on our front porch with the intention of eventually getting it over to a local secondhand store, but we procrastinated and it started to fall apart.  About the same time, I noticed that it had been taken over by a colony of honeybees.  They've been fun to watch these past months and, although we have no intention of trying to harvest honey, my thought was that they would play an important part in pollinating our wildflowers in late fall and early winter when the native bees had called it quits for the year.  My scaleleaf aster (Symphyotrichum adnatum) in particular always blooms so late that I do not get viable seed and I've always wanted to add this species to what I can offer others. The honeybee in the photo above is nectaring on a late-summer aster (S. lateriflorum) so it made sense to me that they would use the scaleleaf as well.  They haven't touched it, however.

Over the course of watching bees these past decades I've learned that bees of all kinds are not generalists.  The honeybees that have taken up home in the dresser less than 20 yards from my wildflower area are busy foraging - somewhere.  Just not in my wildflowers.  They're also ignoring the blooms on my eastern silver aster (S. concolor) and generally bypass my patches of red salvia (Salvia coccinea).  They must be leaving my landscape to pollinate plants in the neighborhood and that comes as a somewhat surprise.  It really shouldn't, however.  I've learned something that really just reinforces what I've learned before.  A healthy community needs a healthy community of pollinators.  Having just a few doesn't work well and relying on honeybees doesn't work well at all. Right now, at the end of December, I see almost no native pollinators and what I have will disappear further after this next cold front moves in.  The honeybees will hunker down in the hive in our dresser, but they won't reemerge to pollinate the remaining wildflower blossoms in my landscape.  I'll have to hope that a few flowers in this mass of asters got pollinated by something I failed to witness.

Diversity is the key to any wildflower/pollinator planting - both a diversity of wildflowers and pollinators.  Bees (and butterfiles, etc.) are not equals.


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