Native pollinators - help them thrive!
Bees are responsible for the pollination of every third bite of food you take and sip of juice you drink. Other insects such as flies, moths, butterflies and beetles pollinate the rest. We help ourselves by providing nectar for bees and protecting them from harmful gardening practices. Intuitively, we can assume that pesticides and other insect poisons used on and around plants will kill bees. But, in fact, herbicides and weed killers do just as much damage to North American native bees and bee colonies. North America’s bees range in size from one-twelfth of an inch to one inch long. Some bees live in colonies; others live alone. Some bees live in hollow plant material and others dig tunnels in the ground to make nests. Five of the seven families of bees are common in American gardens. Altogether, there are around 20,000 species of bees in the world; and, 4,000 of those species live in America. Warm, dry climates such as CA are home to 2,000 species. But the rest of us have more t...