Dear Carol: What wildflowers that are successful in Central New York are good nectar sources for honeybees? -- S.T.
Dear S.T.: Everyone has become concerned about the honeybee in recent years because of the terrible losses that have occurred from what is known as Colony Collapse Disorder, the causes of which are not clear. So many crops are insect pollinated that the economic impact has been considerable. Growers are having to pay more and more to the beekeepers who bring honeybees in at blossom time to pollinate the flowers so that fruit will grow.
Research has long focused on honeybees, a species native to the lands around the Mediterranean. The earliest colonists brought honeybees to America. There are also native bees here, some 450 species in New York, that are valuable pollinators. We know relatively little about them, but clearly they are in trouble too, for some of the same reasons as honeybees.
I was able to attend a workshop in Big Flats that was organized by Paul Salon at the USDA Plant Materials Center with speakers from Cornell University and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Eric Mader, their National Pollinator Outreach Coordinator, describes the Xerces Society as "the Audubon for invertebrates."
The workshop centered on bees, although many other invertebrate pollinators exist such as butterflies, moths, ants, even slugs. Bees are unique in several ways that make them useful to farmers and gardeners. They exhibit "floral constancy," which means that they stick with one type of flower when it's blooming. That is useful to the plant as well, as dandelion pollen isn't any good for an apple blossom. Bees also stay put, and forage around their nests. Some species are active all season long and others only briefly.
Bees are vegetarians, as opposed to wasps which prey on other insects. Bees use nectar as a food source for the adults, but they feed pollen to their larval stages. Pollen is 2 to 35 percent protein by weight, depending on the source. High quality nectar and pollen are both important for good bee plants.
Early fall is a good time to think about providing for the bees. Those patches of flowers by the roadside, on the edges of fields, at the back of the property line, all those places where the goldenrod and asters are flowering, are important food resources for bees of all kinds.
The Xerces Society suggests using native and heirloom plants. Some garden varieties are sterile and lack nectar and pollen. Bees prefer blue, purple, violet, white and yellow flowers. Plant flowers in clumps, four feet across if possible, because more pollinators will be attracted. Have many different shapes and sizes of flowers blooming all season long. Different bees have different preferences.
A few to try include aster, beebalm, boneset, goldenrod, lobelia, lupine, milkweed, sneezeweed, spiderwort, sunflower, turtlehead, wild geranium and wild indigo. In my garden, the bees love sedum and sanguisorba.
Syracusan Carol T. Bradford writes about gardening for Stars and on Saturday in The Post-Standard. Send questions to her at firstname.lastname@example.org or in c/o Stars, P.O. Box 4915, Syracuse, NY 13221.