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Community & Forum Building / Pollinators, Pollinator Gardening, including diverse bees and others
« on: 2022-06-25, 08:16:02 AM »
One of my garden crops is pollinators.
I am a native plant gardener for over 20 years. Professionally I work as a botanist and sometimes albeit rarely get to study pollinators for work. More often I collect seed for wildflowers to replant and support flowers. For native plant gardening I also often grow native north American plants from beyond my local flora. So eastern Montana plants that don't naturally make it to western Montana and plants from the eastern U.S. and California that are very botanically interesting do make it into my native plant gardens at home.
When I was I think a teenager Seeds Blum in Idaho a once awesome garden catalogue had a mix up with their beans. A highly effective native pollinator crossed them one year! So they offered the resulting bee pollinated grex.
Dakota Bumble bean is named for such a cross.
A tomato loving fellow I encountered once on facebook claimed that in his state in the upper Midwest he got a lot of natural crosses due to a specific species of pollen robbing bee that would cut into the anther cone. I would love to have that bee species but have never observed such feeding damage. He claimed it was only in his area.
Some legume specialist bees are good at crossing our normally inbreeding legumes.
Montana is currently doing its first ever bee survey. Maybe as an act of citizen science I should do my own bee survey on my eight acres. I have about four acres of degraded hill prairie of the Palouse prairie type with a mix of native and introduced plants.
Then I have some pollinator plants I grew for the bees. Including some natives that don't naturally occur on the property. Anise Hyssop or Agastache urticifolia is a favorite pollinator plant I plant along with Bee Balm Monarda fistulosa. I also have Agastache foeniculum and need to propagate more of it. I have at least three strains of bee balm all of which I think are Monarda fistulosa or at least hybrids with it. One came from a nursery I was working at, another came from a county distributed pollinator mix, and the third is a local ecotype native strain. I also do have some wild plants on my hill.
Another favorite is milkweed which for me is mostly the local native species showy milkweed or Asclepias speciosa but I also grow or have grown Asclepias incarnata, Asclepias fasciculata, Asclepias cordifolia, and I have tried multiple times to get Asclepias tuberosa started to no avail. I am currently starting a new start of incarnata after it died out some time ago and my fasciculata and cordifolia I have yet to see come back this year though they have been coming back. The big patches are all Asclepias speciosa though.
My wife is growing a cut flower garden with a diverse mix of mostly non-native flowers, but she is including some native flowers.
My crops thus year include buckwheat, turnips, radish, corn, beans, peas, favas, squash, watermelons, and tomatoes amongst them. Diverse crops and pollinators plantings and even weeds provide a garden a nice backdrop to support bee diversity.
I attended a bee identification workshop once through work put on by some researchers who did a large study in California and they strongly supported planting floral diversity in gardens to support bees. In their study it probably helped to have natives or some natives in the mix, but the most important thing to support bee diversity is to plant diverse floral resources- so lots of species of plants, particularly flowering plants.
I also briefly got to study butterflies intensely for a former job some 10+ years ago. Butterflies also need a diversity of plants including specific larval host plants and specific floral food plants. Often varying by species. I am a bit against planting non-native butterfly bush to attract them- at least not without also taking the time to research and plant native larval food plants and native nectar sources as well.
Oh also there are certain plants which attract humming birds and no garden is complete without them! Bee balm, golden currant Ribes aureum, Ipomopsis aggregata or scarlet gilia are a few of my favorite natives in this region. Basically look for red and yellow tubular flowers and particularly native ones.
A favorite native tree of mine is Blue Elderberry which used to go by Sambucus caerulea and Sambucus mexicana but is now considered to be Sambucus nigra ssp. caerulea and grows all along the west coast states. It attracts a significant pollinator complex, has a long period of bloom, produces fruit which makes delicious jelly, and also the fruit attracts birds. I also have a Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis from Eastern North America. Some cultivars of the European elderberry Sambucus nigra ssp. nigra are sold at garden centers and any of these three-tree subspecies will work for pollinators throughout the circumboreal range of the species. Though your local native subspecies may be the best recognized- my Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis doesn't attract the birds as readily as the Sambucus nigra ssp. caerulea a bit of an advantage. It would be interesting to compare the pollinator complex of the two trees. I have a third tree which the first year it set fruit had black fruit and I thought it canadensis and then in subsequent years developed fruit with a yeast bloom like caerulea. It is a seedling and could be a hybrid between the subspecies or it might just be caerulea and it took the yeast a year to colonize, uncertain!
So I am curious about my pollinators and also about my natural out crossing rates. Organic gardens with lots of diverse floral resources can support a lot of pollinator insects. Pollinators can include bees, wasps, flies, mosquitoes, butterflies, moths, and some odd balls like mammalian bats. Most common might be the diverse species of bees that visit flowers.
I am a native plant gardener for over 20 years. Professionally I work as a botanist and sometimes albeit rarely get to study pollinators for work. More often I collect seed for wildflowers to replant and support flowers. For native plant gardening I also often grow native north American plants from beyond my local flora. So eastern Montana plants that don't naturally make it to western Montana and plants from the eastern U.S. and California that are very botanically interesting do make it into my native plant gardens at home.
When I was I think a teenager Seeds Blum in Idaho a once awesome garden catalogue had a mix up with their beans. A highly effective native pollinator crossed them one year! So they offered the resulting bee pollinated grex.
Dakota Bumble bean is named for such a cross.
A tomato loving fellow I encountered once on facebook claimed that in his state in the upper Midwest he got a lot of natural crosses due to a specific species of pollen robbing bee that would cut into the anther cone. I would love to have that bee species but have never observed such feeding damage. He claimed it was only in his area.
Some legume specialist bees are good at crossing our normally inbreeding legumes.
Montana is currently doing its first ever bee survey. Maybe as an act of citizen science I should do my own bee survey on my eight acres. I have about four acres of degraded hill prairie of the Palouse prairie type with a mix of native and introduced plants.
Then I have some pollinator plants I grew for the bees. Including some natives that don't naturally occur on the property. Anise Hyssop or Agastache urticifolia is a favorite pollinator plant I plant along with Bee Balm Monarda fistulosa. I also have Agastache foeniculum and need to propagate more of it. I have at least three strains of bee balm all of which I think are Monarda fistulosa or at least hybrids with it. One came from a nursery I was working at, another came from a county distributed pollinator mix, and the third is a local ecotype native strain. I also do have some wild plants on my hill.
Another favorite is milkweed which for me is mostly the local native species showy milkweed or Asclepias speciosa but I also grow or have grown Asclepias incarnata, Asclepias fasciculata, Asclepias cordifolia, and I have tried multiple times to get Asclepias tuberosa started to no avail. I am currently starting a new start of incarnata after it died out some time ago and my fasciculata and cordifolia I have yet to see come back this year though they have been coming back. The big patches are all Asclepias speciosa though.
My wife is growing a cut flower garden with a diverse mix of mostly non-native flowers, but she is including some native flowers.
My crops thus year include buckwheat, turnips, radish, corn, beans, peas, favas, squash, watermelons, and tomatoes amongst them. Diverse crops and pollinators plantings and even weeds provide a garden a nice backdrop to support bee diversity.
I attended a bee identification workshop once through work put on by some researchers who did a large study in California and they strongly supported planting floral diversity in gardens to support bees. In their study it probably helped to have natives or some natives in the mix, but the most important thing to support bee diversity is to plant diverse floral resources- so lots of species of plants, particularly flowering plants.
I also briefly got to study butterflies intensely for a former job some 10+ years ago. Butterflies also need a diversity of plants including specific larval host plants and specific floral food plants. Often varying by species. I am a bit against planting non-native butterfly bush to attract them- at least not without also taking the time to research and plant native larval food plants and native nectar sources as well.
Oh also there are certain plants which attract humming birds and no garden is complete without them! Bee balm, golden currant Ribes aureum, Ipomopsis aggregata or scarlet gilia are a few of my favorite natives in this region. Basically look for red and yellow tubular flowers and particularly native ones.
A favorite native tree of mine is Blue Elderberry which used to go by Sambucus caerulea and Sambucus mexicana but is now considered to be Sambucus nigra ssp. caerulea and grows all along the west coast states. It attracts a significant pollinator complex, has a long period of bloom, produces fruit which makes delicious jelly, and also the fruit attracts birds. I also have a Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis from Eastern North America. Some cultivars of the European elderberry Sambucus nigra ssp. nigra are sold at garden centers and any of these three-tree subspecies will work for pollinators throughout the circumboreal range of the species. Though your local native subspecies may be the best recognized- my Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis doesn't attract the birds as readily as the Sambucus nigra ssp. caerulea a bit of an advantage. It would be interesting to compare the pollinator complex of the two trees. I have a third tree which the first year it set fruit had black fruit and I thought it canadensis and then in subsequent years developed fruit with a yeast bloom like caerulea. It is a seedling and could be a hybrid between the subspecies or it might just be caerulea and it took the yeast a year to colonize, uncertain!
So I am curious about my pollinators and also about my natural out crossing rates. Organic gardens with lots of diverse floral resources can support a lot of pollinator insects. Pollinators can include bees, wasps, flies, mosquitoes, butterflies, moths, and some odd balls like mammalian bats. Most common might be the diverse species of bees that visit flowers.