Bees drive the productivity of nearly 75% of the world’s flowering plants, including many vegetables we consume. Pollination, the transfer of pollen between flowers, allows plants like squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes to set fruit, directly influencing the size and abundance of your harvest. Without the work of native bees and honey bees, garden yields would be drastically reduced. Creating an environment that actively draws these beneficial insects is the most effective strategy for ensuring a bountiful crop, addressing their needs for food, water, shelter, and a safe foraging area.
Selecting Attractive Plants
The most direct way to attract bees is by providing a consistent and varied food supply that complements the flowering period of your vegetables. Bees are drawn to flowers offering easily accessible nectar and pollen, favoring simple, single-petal blooms over complex, double-petaled varieties. Planting non-vegetable flowers near your vegetable rows acts as a powerful lure, ensuring bees are more likely to visit your crop flowers.
Bees possess a visual spectrum that is highly sensitive to blue, purple, and yellow, making flowers of these colors particularly effective magnets. Annuals such as sunflowers, zinnias, and cosmos offer season-long blooms and are known pollinator favorites. For perennial options, consider coneflowers (Echinacea) and bee balm (Monarda), which provide reliable food sources year after year.
Integrating herbs and flowering vegetables into your garden design also provides attractive forage. Allowing herbs like basil, dill, mint, and cilantro to flower offers a dense concentration of nectar and pollen. Succession planting, which involves selecting plants that bloom sequentially from early spring to late autumn, guarantees food is available throughout the entire growing season. Since bees prefer to forage efficiently, planting in clusters of the same species, rather than single scattered plants, makes your garden a more appealing destination.
Providing Water and Shelter
Beyond food, bees require clean water for hydration, cooling their hives, and diluting stored honey. A simple, shallow water source can be created using a dish, saucer, or bird bath filled with clean water. It is important to add landing spots that break the water’s surface, allowing bees to drink without drowning. These landing spots can include:
- Pebbles
- Small stones
- Corks
- Marbles
Place the water station in a sunny spot near flowering plants and refresh the water every few days to keep it clean. For ground-nesting solitary bees, which make up the majority of native species, shelter is found in the soil. Leaving small, undisturbed patches of bare, well-drained earth exposed in a sunny location provides the necessary material and space for them to excavate nests.
For cavity-nesting bees, such as mason bees, you can provide shelter by leaving hollow or pithy stems from plants like elderberry or blackberry intact over winter. Simple, pre-made bee houses or hotels that contain hollow tubes or drilled holes in wood blocks also serve as suitable nesting sites. Placing these structures in a secure, sunny location, protected from rain, encourages these beneficial species to take up permanent residence near your vegetable garden.
Maintaining a Safe Habitat
The presence of harmful chemicals is one of the greatest threats to bee populations and can undermine all other attraction efforts. Broad-spectrum insecticides, such as neonicotinoids and pyrethroids, are highly toxic and can cause immediate death. Systemic insecticides are particularly problematic because the chemical is absorbed by the plant and expressed in the nectar and pollen, poisoning bees as they forage.
Even sublethal exposure can impair a bee’s ability to navigate, forage, and learn, compromising colony health. Herbicides remove flowering weeds that serve as food, and fungicides can have toxic synergistic effects when mixed with insecticides. Adopting an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach minimizes chemical use by focusing on monitoring, prevention, and using non-chemical controls first.
If pest control is necessary, use the least toxic product, such as insecticidal soaps or horticultural oils, and apply them late in the evening when bees are not actively foraging. Garden practices that minimize disturbance are also important for bee safety, especially since 70% of native bees nest underground. Avoiding unnecessary tilling or heavy mulching keeps the soil structure intact, protecting existing nest sites and overwintering bees.