Sackville Wild Bees 2024
Helping The Bees
Here are some helpful tips on ways that you can make your garden spaces beneficial for our local wild bees!
These ideas came from "The Bees in Your Backyard" by Joseph S. Wilson & Olivia Messinger Carril. You can buy your own copy here.
Building Habitat
Many species of wild bees are ground nesters. This means that they make their nests in the ground rather than within cavities above ground. Different species of ground nesters will prefer different types of habitat substrates, but the most important thing is that it remains undisturbed. The bees don't want their hard work to be brushed away by a lawn mower or a playful dog! Some bees like dense grass lawns and others prefer different types of soils.
A helpful tip is to leave the empty areas in your flower beds un-mulched. Having these bare areas of soil are useful for the bees, and these are low traffic areas to people and pets! If you want to put something down between your flowers, some people suggest a loose, sandy soil.
Providing Food
Bees eat both nectar and pollen from the flowers they visit. They need the nectar for carbohydrates and eat some pollen for proteins and other nutrients. Early in the spring there are some species of bees that hatch before many flowers are in bloom. This is why early flowering species of flowers are particularly important for bees. Some queens, and newly hatched bees, are waking up and they're hungry.
No Mow May
There has been a "No Mow May" movement for a few years, where you try to not mow your lawn for the month of May. This is to allow dandelions time to grow, and bees to visit them. Dandelions aren't a very nutritious food source for bees, but when there are very few other flowers dandelions are okay. Instead of No Mow May, we in the lab recommend trying to plant other early flowering species of flower.
Local Flowers
These flowers are beneficial to both specialist and generalist bees in the Maritimes. Don't be intimidated to start a bee garden. Bees will come to anything that flowers, so start small. Additionally, many of the vegetables grown in this area are already bee friendly, so you may have a head start on your bee garden.
To attract the most bees of different genera, plant different types of flowers. Mix it up between flowering time, colour, and shapes. Also, bees like it when there are clusters of flowers all together, so planting in a pot is preferable than planting in linear rows.
Planting Guides
This guide below was developed by the New Brunswick Invasive Species Council & the Nova Scotia Invasive Species Council and is a great resource for what to plant in your home garden.
This guide was developed by the David Suzuki Foundation for native plants of New Brunswick. This is an easy to follow guide on what plants are beneficial for all pollinators (including bees!).
They also have guides for the rest of Atlantic Canada.