Plants for bees: Promoting California native bee habitat in gardens

California bee populations are declining due to lack of ample, healthy forage. One underutilized solution is increasing the use of bee forage plants in urban landscapes and gardens. Our team has recently completed a four-year evaluation of bee attractiveness of select California native and non-native landscape plants. However, nursery producers often lack information about how to grow and use these plants to support bees, thereby limiting their use in the landscape for this purpose.

In addition, we were only able to evaluate a small proportion of the hundreds of plants grown in nurseries, and new species and cultivars continue to come into production. Growers need to be able to continue to identify those plants most likely to be used as bee forage.

We are addressing these needs in two ways. First, we are comparing grower-useable bee attractiveness assessments to evaluate their utility for the nursery industry. The relative net precision of different bee counting methods will be compared to determine which can most effectively be used by growers and land managers to evaluate bee attractiveness. This presentation reports on the first year’s results.

Second, we are creating educational content in English and Spanish to train the state’s horticulture industry to effectively grow and use the best plants to support native bees. This presentation will discuss the bee-attractive plants identified in our studies and will describe some of the educational resources we are developing.