Native Bee & Pollinator Garden Visit

On the clear sunny morning of May 10th, twenty or so native plant and bee lovers met up at the private garden of Michael and Carol Ellis to learn more about habitat for pollinators.  Michael and Carol have a wealth of knowledge from their involvement with the Sonoma County Beekeepers Association and personal experience from starting their garden from scratch.  

We learned Carol and Michael prepared an area for their new pollinator garden in early 2024.  They first killed the grass by layering cardboard, compost, mulch and more compost over four months to prepare the soil for planting.  Carol and Michael selected about 70% native flowering plants and 30% non native flowers so that both visiting honey bees and local pollinators, including native bees, would have food needed to thrive.  Without the non native plants, honey bees would be feeding on the native plants, the plants critical for native pollinators survival. 

Carol and Michael delighted us with fun facts about native bees who are extremely varied in size, pollinating style, home making and coloring.  
A few tidbits to wet your appetite for discovering more about native bees

• Leaf cutter bees cut rounded leaf pieces to line the inner walls of their nest burrow, look for perfect circles cut out of leaves on your plants
• Other species of natives bees collect leaf fuzz to line their nest burrow, lambs ear leaves have been used for this purpose
• Carpenter bees are gentle giants who tend to find holes in unpainted, untreated wood to burrow into to lay their eggs, we were assured that they will not destroy structures (but can be deterred by paint or stain)
• Some bees, like Bumble bees, are generalists and will use pollen from a wide variety of flowering plants
•  Other bees like squash bee (pollinators of cucurbit plants; squash, pumpkin, and zucchini) have some degree of specialization in foraging; they get pollen from only one or two families of flowering plants
• There are 4,000 species of native bees in the United States, with over 200 species in the Sonoma County area
• Native bees nest in a variety of places; in the ground, in tunnels in rock piles, in logs, in stems of some plants (so leave some stem when you are pruning/cutting down plants in your yard)  You can build/buy a house for mason bees, then order them online and follow the directions for having them live and reproduce in your garden
• Native bees are pollinators for vegetables, fruits and nuts

Carol highly recommended the documentary PBS Film:  My Garden of 1000 bees
“Taking refuge from the coronavirus pandemic, wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn set out to record all the bees he could find in his tiny urban garden in Bristol, England, filming them with one-of-a-kind lenses he forged on his kitchen table. See his surprising discoveries in My Garden of a Thousand Bees”
A huge thank you to Carol and Michael for hosting AGVWC at their garden and sharing their excitement and personal mission to provide pollinator habitat and to educate others about the importance of biodiversity of native pollinators and native plants as an important part of ecosystem health!  Carol has invited garden visitors from May 10th to visit the garden on their own in July/August to view summer blooms, come during business hours when the gates are open please.

Dena Allen
AGVWC Board Member

Additional Resources
    Xerces Society
    Flashcards of Native Bees of the Western US 
    Theadore Payne 
    CalFlora Nursery
    Willowside School Nursery