Hobby gardeners are promoting numerous visits from wild bees to their fruit and vegetable gardens. There are two natural methods you can use to make your garden attractive to important pollinators. You can find out how to successfully attract wild bees here.
How can you attract wild bees?
To successfully attract wild bees, offer nesting aids such as hollow stems, dead wood or interlocking tiles and plant bee-friendly plants such as daisies, buttercups or labiate as well as a wild bee meadow in your garden.
Attracting wild bees with nesting aids
The February sun awakens the first wild bees from hibernation, which they spent in the protection of their pupal shell. After fortifying themselves on early-flowering nectar sources, wild bees start looking for suitable nesting opportunities. With these nesting aids you invite wild bees to linger in the garden:
- Fill the wooden frame with hollow stems (knotweed, bamboo, reed), secure with clay, secure against birds with rabbit wire
- Pile up crumbly dead wood as a hedge, ideally with beetle drill holes as natural nesting holes
- Build a nesting aid out of old interlocking bricks
Many wild bee species prefer wood as nesting material. You can transform a thick tree slice made of hardwood or a cut branch without bark into a tempting wild bee hotel in just a few simple steps. To do this, use the wood drill to create nesting tubes with diameters between 3 and 10 mm at a distance of 1 to 2 cm. To prevent wild bee ladies from injuring themselves during the inspection, sand the entrances smooth and remove all shavings.
Invite wild bees with gourmet plants
If a garden has the right food plants, wild bees will flock there. It is important to have a varied planting plan with native perennials that provide plenty of food for every wild bee species. A selection of the best gourmet plants for wild bees names the following overview:
- Basic rule: plant native wild plants with simple, unfilled flowers in the bee-friendly garden
- Wild bee meadow: Scatter wild bee willow seeds or sow Veitshöchheim bee pasture
- For silk bees (Colletes): daisy family (Asteracea), tansy (Tanacetum vulgare), golden yarrow (Achillea)
- For mason bees (Osmia): Lepidoptera (Fabaceae), lilies (Liliaceae), violets (Viola), willows (Salix)
- For fur bees (Anthrophora): Mint family (Lamiaceae), for example deadnettle (Lamium maculatum)
Various species of wild bees have specialized in a single plant species as a source of food. These include the bluebell sawhorn bee (Melitta haemorrhoidalis) with a penchant for the tangled bluebell (Campanula glomerata).
Tip
Did you know that bumblebees are wild bees? Together with mason bees, sand bees and other wild species, the big brummers do more than 90 percent of the pollination work in the garden. Bumblebee queens are the only wild bee species to establish a small colony shortly after the end of winter. Wild bumblebees are magically attracted to early-flowering perennials such as lungwort (Pulmonaria officinalis), mountain knapweed (Centaurea montana) or common heather (Calluna).
