Creating a Pollinator Garden (Ep. 4)

Your garden is unique, just like you. Everyone chooses to plant not only what will thrive in their area but also flowers, vegetables, shrubs, and trees they love. But what about selecting plants pollinators will love too? I talked about that with Dr. Harland Patch from Pennsylvania State University. 

Having a diverse range of plants in your garden is essential to supporting a thriving ecosystem of pollinators, such as bees, butterflies, and flies. When choosing plants, it’s important to consider their bloom time and spread it out across the season to maximize biodiversity.

Dr. Patch focuses his research on many aspects of pollinator biology, from genes to landscapes, making him the perfect person to advise us on what to plant. He’s also the scientific advisor and Director of Pollinator Programming at Penn State’s Bird and Pollinator Garden, a recently built 4-acre garden based on scientific research. Take a virtual visit to this gorgeous garden and learn more about what they’ve made.

Ready to go all-in for the pollinators? Watch this webinar from Dr. Patch on the importance of plant choice and design when planning your garden.

The Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State does lots of pollinator-related research but also has some great resources for gardeners looking to do more for the bees in their spaces.

You can create the ideal pollinator garden in just four easy steps. Learn how through Penn State’s pollinator garden program. It offers a certificate to Pennsylvania gardeners, but everyone can use the tips to make their yard the place to be.

Did you know?

Dr. Patch talked about “understory plants” and their importance to bees. Understory plants are shrubs or small trees that don’t need much sun. They can thrive in the canopy shade created by taller trees.

Transcript

You’ve probably already thought about how you’d like your garden or yard to look this year. What flowers or vegetables to plant, what needs to be trimmed or perhaps replaced. Maybe you even discovered a new flower or shrub you’re excited to plant. But with all your floral planning, did you remember to include the bees? Today on The Bees Knees

we’re going to talk about pollinator gardens. These are spaces specifically designed to attract bees and other pollinators to your yard. And to tell us how is Dr. Harland Patch, Assistant Research Professor at Pennsylvania State University in the US and part of the University’s Center for Pollinator Research.

Harland, thanks for being here. When planting your garden and yard with the intention of attracting bees and other pollinators, I’d like to ask you about three things. Any must-haves, what about water and how do we protect our bees from pesticides? Yes, and this is a very easy message to any of your listeners.

It’s simply plant more flowers, flowering trees and shrubs, the forbs that most people think about, like meadow flowers. And if you can plant more native. But just more flowers on average is gonna be better than no flowers. Insects have a real problem with water. Because if you ever notice, they get stuck in the surface tension of the water and they can drown.

So over a long period because they have a very different respiratory system, than human beings. So if you do have water resources, say in your garden for bees, and you’ll find bees and wasps, and other things at the edge, and sometimes, uh, butterflies, uh, puddling, it’s nice to have a graded edge in your pond with little rocks and things so they don’t get stuck in that surface tension.

And if we design and build any kind of ponds, we like to have a graded edge, which apparently it’s quite engineeringly, difficult to do, um, and put rocks and things like that for your pollinators. So when you do have a pest in your garden, say you live in a place where you got a lot of fungus, fungicides are not pesticides, but they actually do kill bees and other kinds of pollinators and insects.

The way to do those kind of treatments, if you must do them, and of course you should never prophylactically used pesticides in any setting. It should always be a response to something where you’ve gone through all the other steps you can do, but that’s the last thing you can do. You should spray at night if you can.

If you can convince your sprayer to do that at night, that’s when the pollinators are not around, they’re sleeping. That’s the best practice, especially if you have bloom on your fruit trees. If you can wait till after bloom, that’s really ideal. That’s a lot of places where we see bee kills is on, uh, fruit trees and they’re being sprayed because of fungicide and fungus on the flowers.

Eventually they’re developing fruit. Spray at night and do it in the most limited way you can figure out doing it. Don’t use very much and don’t do it very often. Even if you need to treat your lawn for, if you, you don’t sort of want an unsightly, what people would consider an unsightly lawn. There’s a lot of ways to do lawns, to do it very infrequently, only every few years if you have to do it.

So just the overall load over time, just have the least load you can possibly create and manage, which means really being a good gardener and learning a lot about um, your garden and how to treat pests and other ways to do those things. Because pests are a problem in people’s gardens and people want to deal with them. And so you can learn a way to balance that.

But for most gardeners just plant things that don’t get a lot of pests. I do the same in my own garden. I only plant things that I know are not gonna get super pesty. Some things I know I like to get pesty, like, um, butterfly plants, which I want the butterflies to eat up. You know, I just let that go. So, yeah, I think most landscapes, most people can really manage a low pesticide landscape.

So you have been instrumental in bringing a pollinator’s garden to Penn State’s Arboretum. Can you share a bit about what you’ve learned so far about choosing habitats, floral resources, and other elements to support a high diversity of pollinators? Yes. The garden at Penn State that we’ve created, and it’s, it’s been in existence for about two on going onto three years now.

So it’s very new garden. Um, the trees and plants are just getting established. I will say that having good soil. All the soils in this garden have been, I’ll call it engineered, but created for the different habitat types we have. They’ve been enhanced. Having good soil has been a great benefit to plants growing very rigorously, and even in the early years, so we’ve been quite pleased.

This is about a four acre garden. And it has different habitat types. They’re not facsimiles of native habitats. They couldn’t be cause of very particulars of those kinda places. But we found when we set out with a single intent of supporting as many pollinators that live in this part of the world. And so we created from the science up, we used a scientific records to make the plant choices.

And in our part of the world, that means we have open meadow landscape, we have a forest landscape. There are two bee seasons in most temperate places. There’s the season early in the year, and that’s trees and shrubs. When the canopy closes, then there’s a whole different group of trees and plants through summer til fall, so there’s two bee seasons really.

It’s planted for that. So it has natural habitats, but then it has an orchard, a vegetable garden. And a garden that includes native and non-native plants. The most well-behaved of the native plants, they’re quite garden worthy. You know, some can become very dominant as also the non-native plants that we, um, through research have found do support pollinators. And this is very important.

They don’t jump the fence and become a problem invasive species, which many, um, non-native plants can do. So what we have learned and what we really set off to do is. The sheer diversity of plants. So we have over three hundred and fifty native plant species, plus others. So our goal was to pack as much in to what is actually a small area.

It’s a lot to weed, but it’s a relatively small area to pack as many in per square meter. And this required working with Phyto Studio, Claudia West, we were very lucky, um, to work with such a, a premier group of native plant designers who really understand plant ecology, uh, the biology of plants, and could get our sort of scientific message, our understanding of interactions of these plants, with the pollinators, the kinds of foods they need, and the timing throughout the year, they got that immediately.

And we’re able to create these very integrated designs with interspersed plantings, which allowed us to get a lot of plants in a very small space. So it’s this mix of a lot of different species of plants if you can get ’em and you can manage them, cause the management is a very important topic and how many you can get into your small space.

So that really is the central take home message is just having a high diversity of plants, which will support a high diversity of pollinators, lots of bees, butterflies, flies, and we designed it specifically for those things in mind. You mentioned the two bee seasons. Yes. Can you talk about that a bit more? When we’re thinking about our gardens and making sure we have the appropriate flowers and plants and trees and shrubs in the spring when they first start to arrive, and then all the way through the fall when they’re beginning to prepare to over winter?

Yes, thank you. That’s a great question because it lets us touch on all the things that are quite important for gardens. The plant you choose is vital. The timing of its bloom and having that spread out across the season for if to sort of maximize biodiversity, if that’s your interest. Early in the year, you’ll notice and the same pattern occurs in deserts as they

get the rain. So you get this sort of suite of blooming and then you have high point. The same thing happens in our forest early in the year. What you’ll find, it’s different in different parts of the world, but in our temperate forest, you’ll see that there are some very early trees that come out. A lot of places it’ll be things like maple trees.

And you’ll also have a lot of very interesting and very curious shrubs come out. They’ll bloom quite early. This will sort of go on through this early spring. Depending on where you live, they can be quite sequential. If you live in a place that’s slightly warmer, they kinda all pop up at the same time.

You’ll see this blooming. In North America, we don’t have a lot of, uh, bulbs that grow in the open field. We do have understory plants. We don’t have open bulb. Like a lot of these bulbs that are from the old world, Europe and Asia, we don’t have them here. They’re all imported. So we have a very specific in North America, uh, group of plants and trees, shrubs and trees

are quite neglected. So they’re flowering and you’ll see very interesting things on them. It’s a very easy kind of gardening as well. Once you establish those trees and shrubs, if you have a large space, of course some of the trees, of course, North American trees can be so massive over time. So you might try some understory trees, uh, like American Dog Wood, hollies, if you live in the, in sort of the right warmer climate and other sorts of plant serviceberry is a wonderful one to have in the springtime

many, many things come to that plant. Those plants are very important and what happens is there are a group of bees if, we had, figures, I could show you all this in pictures. It’s kinda cool. You have groups of bees that really are forest bees and they’re in the forest at that time because the forbs are trying to grow to flower, right?

And they sort of get going, they get going bit little bit in May, and then they start going up until they really get going in July, August, they really sort of max out. When the canopy closes once, and of course there are lots of understory, uh, spring plants, especially if you have very rich soil, you’ll find a lot of those plants if you’re lucky enough to be in such a place.

Once that canopy closes, the bees don’t fly through the forest anymore. You can walk through a forest in mid summer and there’s nothing. I mean, if there’s something blooming, it could be at the top of the forest, but you’re not up there. You walk through, you see nothing. Um, not the same in spring. And then in the summer, then you have all those forbs, those field plants that most people associate with pollinators that will go on again, you have a max and midsummer of the diversity of things

you’ll see, and that curves off into the fall. Then you start seeing interesting, a handful of interesting bees and other pollinators late in the fall, and some often very beautiful plants that will go literally up to the freeze and then they’ll just drop off. Then it’s wintertime. What’s your favorite bee? I have a favorite bee almost every different day.

You know, they’re 20,000 bee species on the planet. They all have marvelous natural history. I mean, it’s really a joy to work on them and to think a lot about them and to research them. We have only scraped the surface of the natural history of these species. But just recently, uh, I’m working on some, some bees and a lot associated with human beings historically.

And Melipona beecheii, which is the Mayan stingless bee, has recently become my favorite bee because I’m reading a lot of ethnography and the history of the Mayan people. Mesoamerican culture, that bee is a quite a marvelous bee. In the old world, Apis mellifera and subspecies and related species of honeybee are native. They’re not native to North America, as you would know, and South America.

They were brought by Europeans. There was native Apis species here, millions of years ago, but it went extinct, kind of like horses, you know. It was native here and then it came back.

So the Peoples of the Americas actually used other species of bees and the great civilization of Mesoamerica had used this particular bee and the Mayans are most associated with it since ancient times. In fact, beekeeping practice has continued up until this time, and unfortunately Mayan beekeepers are declining as they age

many people are not going into it. There was a deforestation, a massive deforestation during the Mayan period in the pre-Columbian times, and then there has been recently modern deforestation in those same areas, which has really affected the bees. They seem to not be making as much honey, which is a much smaller amount than than Apis mellifera bees.

And so unfortunately that is declining and it seems as the bee is declining itself in across because its habitat is being destroyed. Once again, it’s plant more flowers. We need more flowers for all these bees. This bee is very fascinating because of its relationship to humans. The Mayans, uh, used it to actually sweeten a drink called balché, which they drank, an alcoholic drink, which you can still get when you go to, um, anywhere between Mexico, Guatemala, those places.

And still, I think it’s actually even produced commercially a version of it. So fascinating because humans across the world, every civilization, every culture, every group of people who have any, um, relationship and ability to get honey of any species, adore it and love it and prize it very highly. Anything else you would like to add about making sure we are feeding our bees in our gardens year round?

The one thing I would also add is that no garden is an island. You live in a community. Hopefully many of us live in communities. Not only should your own garden be diverse, we know for studies that have been done that places that have the most diversity of bees and other species, each person who’s making a garden makes a different sort of garden, right?

So everybody who plants gardens, you should be very different from your neighbor. In fact, you should get quite eccentric and grow all sorts of interesting flowering things, as many as you can, and encourage your neighbor to be very unlike you. Creating that patchwork of a diversity in our urban and semi-urban landscapes in our rural landscapes, it’s gonna benefit many different species

because it creates the kinds of niches and you just happen on the kinds of plants that this species or that species may need. Again, focusing on native things, but just the sheer diversity will encourage diversity in the world in which you live. Is your garden eccentric? Please send us photos. I love Harland’s recommendation to plant a lot and plant different.

It’s not necessary to completely give your garden over to the bees, but it is surprisingly easy and beautiful to include some tasty pollen and nectar resources for them. My thanks again to Dr. Harland Patch from Pennsylvania State University. I’ve included a link to a video of the Pollinator’s Garden at Penn State’s Arboretum

in our show notes. You’ll also find there a webinar from Dr. Patch with more information about pollinator gardens and a link to a step-by-step list to create a garden that is pollinator friendly. Thanks so much for listening the bees, and I appreciate your time. If you like the show, we’d love it if you followed us, told a friend or left a review.

If you have any ideas for future episodes or you know a bee expert, we should talk to get in touch, send us a message on our website, The Bees Knees.website. That’s where you’ll find today’s show notes transcript and a newsletter signup form. Looking forward to talking with you again in two weeks. Until then, keep buzzing.