![]() Plan your garden to have a long season of bloom. However, bumblebees are not fussy anything that produces nectar and pollen works for them! If you plant even a small area or a few containers with flowering plants, the bees will find them. To attract bumblebees and other native bee species, consider native plants-such as asters, coneflowers ( Echinacea spp.), lupines, bee balm ( Monarda spp.), and spring ephemerals. Which Flowers Attract Bumblebees?īumblebees have to work harder than ever to find food and shelter due to habitat loss and the overuse of pesticides. Crops such as tomatoes, peppers, berries, and cranberries bear better fruits if they are buzz pollinated. The flowers on berries are enclosed, so it takes a bumblebee’s long “tongue” to get to the plant’s nectar. If you can get one to hold still long enough, look closely and you’ll notice the pollen basket (or “corbicula”) on its rear legs where it stashes a load of pollen to carry back to the nest. Bumblebees’ wings beat more than 130 times per second! They perform a unique service called “buzz pollination” by grabbing the pollen producing part of the plant in their jaws and vibrating their wing muscles to loosen trapped pollen. Bottle gentian flowersįemale worker bees do the collecting of nectar and pollen. The bottle gentian (Gentiana andrewsii), for example, has developed bottle-shape flowers that never open fully, which means that a strong bee must pry its way into the flower to pollinate it. Many crops are well suited to natural pollination by bumblebees, including cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, seed crops, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, melons, and squash. They are especially attracted to tube-shaped flowers and some flowers have evolved to be almost exclusively pollinated by these beefy bees. They mainly forage for pollen rather than nectar, and transfer more pollen to the pistils of the flowers with each visit. ![]() Yes! Bumblebees are excellent pollinators-much more efficient pollinators than honeybees, in fact.
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