Plant some Flowers for Your Pollinators!

 

My Pollinator Garden: How I Plant for Bees, Butterflies, Beetles, and More (Books for a Better Earth) 

by Jordan Zwetchkenbaum; illus. by Kate Cosgrove 

40 pages; ages 3-6 

‎Holiday House, 2025

theme: garden, pollinators, ecology

My garden is full of flowers. I like the pretty colors. I like that they smell good.

Those lovely flower smells attract animals that take pollen from one plant to another, so the flowers can make seeds. And those animals, from bees to birds, butterflies to bats, are called pollinators.  Spread by spread readers learn how flowers attract pollinators and how different pollinators carry the pollen. At the same time, we are introduced to a diversity of native bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and bats, flies, beetles, and wasps.

What I like about this book: It’s fun to look at the different pollinators and flowers on each page. There are short-tongued bees and long-tongued bees. Some bees shake the flowers to release the pollen. There’s a fun fact about each of the featured pollinators: what colors they see; whether they fly during the day or night; what attracts them to a particular flower. Back matter includes and author’s note, how to plant for pollinators, a short glossary, sources, and an index to pollinators and their plants.

Beyond the Books: 

Plant some pollinator flowers that are native to your region. You can find a list of plants for your region here at XERCES. If you don’t have a large space for a pollinator garden, plant a way station. A way station flower spot could be as big as the area inside a hula hoop or a few pots on the balcony.

Make sure to have a watering spot for your pollinators. I use a shallow dish with rocks in it. The rocks serve as landing islands once I pour in water. Make sure you keep it filled, especially on hot and sunny days. 

Today we’re joining Perfect Picture Book Friday. It’s a wonderful gathering where bloggers share great picture books at Susanna Leonard Hill's website. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Plant a Pollinator Patch

If you want pollinators visiting your pumpkins and strawberries, melons and cukes, then you'll want to make sure your garden is pollinator-friendly. The easiest way to do that is to plant a pollinator patch. You don't need much room - I plant a 3-foot by 3-foot section for the local bees and butterflies. And I've planted some flowers around the edge of the garden as well. But if space is limited, a 15-inch diameter container is perfect for a balcony. The trick is to plant a variety of flowers that will attract a diversity of pollinators. For example, some bees have short tongues and others have long tongues so they'll be looking for different flower shapes.

The best plants are varieties native to your area. You can find regional plant lists at the Xerces Society and the Pollinator Partnership.

Before I plant flower seeds, I check out what flowers the local pollinators are visiting. In my garden and yard, these are red clover, wild mustards, Queen Anne's lace, asters, milkweed, henbit and deadnettle (both in the genus Lamium), and goldenrod. They may look like “weeds”, but bees and butterflies love them. All I need to do is sprinkle some calendula seeds, maybe add a few bee balm plants, and toss in some cosmos and I've got a lazy-gardener's pollinator patch! I also let some of my herbs go to flower. Bees like to hang out on basil, and flower flies love corriander and dill.  

Pollinators need more than flowers, so I keep a shallow dish of water in my garden. I fill it with stones, so the bees and other visitors don't fall in, and put it in the shade of peppers or tomatoes.

There's one more, very important consideration for creating a safe place for pollinators in your garden: don't use pesticides.

Butterflies Belong Here!

As summer comes to an end, I’ve noticed tons of butterflies flitting around my garden and along the roadside: Monarchs, cabbage butterflies, sulfurs, blues, checkered, and cute, fuzzy skippers.

theme: butterflies, nature, environment

Butterflies Belong Here: A Story of One Idea, Thirty Kids, and a World of Butterflies 
by Deborah Hopkinson; illus. by Meilo So
68 pages; ages 5-8
Chronicle Books, 2020

Last spring, we took a class picture… I was a little like a caterpillar then: quiet and almost invisible.

When a girl moves to a new home, she learns all about monarch butterflies. But when she looks for them in the gardens of her neighborhood, they are hard to find. She hears about way stations – gardens filled with plants that monarchs like – and wonders if she could plant a way station at the school. All it takes is one person with an idea, says the librarian.

What I like about this book: I like that the main character, who remains unnamed, feels empowered enough to lead a class project in planting a monarch garden. It requires a plan, a presentation, and persistence. Planting flowers can sound so simple and small – but when it’s done to make the world a better place for butterflies, it’s huge. Back matter includes a guide to making a monarch way station, monarch facts, and resources for monarch activists of all ages.

Beyond the Books:

Do Monarch butterflies live in your neighborhood? Look for orange and black butterflies flitting around or nectaring at flowers. Then look closer to make sure it’s really a monarch. Here’s how to tell whether you’ve got a monarch.

Make a plan for planting a monarch way station. If you need some help, check out these articles here and here.

Draw or paint a picture of a monarch butterfly. Take a close look at its wings. Are they tattered? Maybe your monarch has been flying south for days.

Monarchs migrate in the fall. You can track the migration here.

Today we're joining Perfect Picture Book Friday, an event where bloggers share great picture books at Susanna Leonard Hill's website. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Creating Pollinator-Friendly Yards

If you want native bees and butterflies to visit your yard, the first thing you need to do is reduce or eliminate your use of pesticides. Instead of spraying chemicals, find other ways to control weeds and insect pests in your garden and yard. Scientists have shown that native bee populations drop by around 50 percent where insecticides have been sprayed. Bumblebees are paralyzed by neonicotinoids – a class of widely used insecticides that act on the nervous system of insects – at levels as low as 12 parts per billion.

Provide as diverse, natural landscape as you can. Are there sections of your property that you can let go a bit wild for the summer and mow once a year? Think about planting native shrubs and trees – they not only enhance the habitat for bees but can add value to your landscaping. Native bees, it turns out, like to forage close to home. While honeybees readily fly two miles to collect nectar and pollen, wild bees rarely fly over 1/2 mile.

Bees depend on nectar for food throughout the entire summer. So think about planting things that bloom over the entire season. Check out the list of flowers bees love below.

Bees also need a source of water. They use water to cool their hives and dilute the honey they feed to their larvae. On extremely hot days, bees might spend more time carrying water back to the hive than foraging for pollen and nectar. Birdbaths work, but make sure the water is shallow, as bees can drown. You can also put a rock or a floating bit of wood in deeper water to provide a place for thirsty bees to land on.

Wild bees need nesting sites. Most of them are solitary, and about a third of them build their nests in wood. They tunnel into the soft pithy centers of some twigs (raspberry canes and sumac) or use tunnels left behind by wood-boring beetle larvae. The other 70 percent are ground-nesters, digging narrow tunnels down to small chambers of brood cells. Ground-nesting bees need direct access to the soil surface and prefer sloped or well-drained sites. Bumblebees, too, build their colonies underground, moving into abandoned rodent burrows.

Encouraging wood-nesting bees can be as simple as retaining dead or dying trees and branches in the hedgerows and encouraging the growth of elderberry, blackberries and raspberries, sumac and dogwood. To attract ground-nesters, leave a small area untilled for a year or actively clear some of the vegetation from a gently sloping or flat area.

Flowers Bees Love

Red maple, chives, Shadbush/ serviceberry, asters, borage, bee plant (Cleome), cosmos, purple coneflower, Joe-pye weed, sunflowers, hyssop, apple blossoms,  mints, bergamot/ bee balm (Monarda), basil, oregano, poppies, plum and cherry blossoms, roses, willows, sage, goldenrod, dandelion, thyme, red clover, blueberries, mullein, zinnias.

You can learn more about bee-friendly gardening here.

Plant a Garden for the Earth

bumblebee on thistle

Next Friday is Earth Day. Here's one simple thing you can do to make the earth a better place: plant a garden for pollinators. Many kinds of bees and butterflies – even bats – carry pollen from the anthers (male part) in one flower to the stigma (female part) of another, allowing for fertilization and fruit production.

One out of every three bites of food we eat is made possible by a pollinator - without them we wouldn’t have strawberry jam, pizza, or applesauce. Not only that, 80 percent of all flowering plants rely on pollinators for survival.

But some native bees and butterflies are having a hard time surviving. Overuse of pesticides can kill of beneficial insects, including those that pollinate our food crops. Fragmenting the landscape, due to development, makes it hard for butterflies and bees to find important food sources so they can raise their young.

You can give pollinators a helping hand – and keep them doing their job – by planting the kinds of flowers they need. You don’t a lot of space to grow flowers that provide nectar for pollinators. But it is important to plant native species. Here’s a list of some plants that are rich in pollen or nectar – you might even find some of them growing in an abandoned lot or along a roadway in your area:

Aster (Aster)

Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia)

Currant (Ribes)

Elder (Sambucus)

Goldenrod (Solidago)

Huckleberry (Vaccinium)

Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium)

Lupine (Lupinus)

Penstemon (Penstemon)

Purple coneflower (Echinacea)

Rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus)

Rhododendron (Rhododendron)

Sage (Salvia)

Stonecrop (Sedum)

Sunflower (Helianthus)

Wild buckwheat (Eriogonum)
Willow (Salix)

Book Giveaway

Enter to win a copy of  Planting the Wild Garden. This particular contest is limited to folks who live in the United States. All you have to do to enter is:

1. Become a follower on Archimedes Notebook if you’re not already (it’s easy – just click on the “follow” button at the right);

2. Leave a comment on this blog about why wild gardens and weedy places are important; and

3. email me at sueheaven{at}gmail{dot}com to let me know you’ve entered so I can email you if you win. I promise I won’t keep any email addresses.

The contest for this book ends Sunday April 17.