Bees and the Garden

Our food garden is our first large experiment in growing intensively. I find I like hand watering. My husband thinks I am crazy, but I find it relaxing and it gives me a chance to inspect the plants and visit with the bugs. Traveling from home does pose problems however.

In any case, what I have been noticing is the lack of bees. When we lived in town, there were tons of bees. The suburbs have many plants in bloom almost the whole year. So bees tend to congregate there. When people spoke of low numbers of bees I wondered what they were talking about. Now I know. We live 15 miles from town. The almond orchards near us have to truck in bees during the spring to ensure proper pollination. I rejoice now whenever I see a lone bee.

This spring when the burr clover was flowering, I intentionally did not cut it so that the bees would visit. They did. But now that I don't have a large tract of land flowering to lure them, I can't seem to get them to come over here. And that is a problem since my tomatoes are in flower and so are the various squash plants. I may have to try and pollinate by hand if I want any fruit. So with the coming rains we will definitely work on our bee guild. Here are some of the plants I hope to get in before next spring:

Acacia sp
Achillea millefolium
Artemisia sp.
Borage
Dandelion
Goldenrod
Ceanothus
Honeysuckle
Goumi
Clover
Salvias
Mints
Mondarda
Elderberry

As Mother Nature would have it, many of these plants are medicinal and dynamic accumulators. Most I had already started collecting this last spring to be planted this fall. I am still on the look out for Goumi (Elaeagnus multiflora). More on dynamic accumulators in another post!

We are thinking of having someone with bees come and rent a piece of our land for their bees. When you do this you get paid in honey. Sounds good. Also mason bees are great pollinators. They don't make honey or have a huge hive, but they do facilitate the production of fruit.

When you are starting a permaculture project, big or small, you realize how intricate Mother Nature really is. And if you want to increase productivity for humans, you need to increase the overall diversity of a site. Along with hardscapes, plants are the key to the beginning stages of development. Can't have much produce without pollinators. So we start thinking like bees and creating a place where they will like to hang out and gather nectar and pollen and in so doing help us out. Believe me, hand pollinating is tedious and not nearly as effective as those marvels of flight, bees.