Here’s the Buzzzz

If you want to attract bees to the garden and keep them happy, there are a few things to keep in mind.

* Grow a variety of plants that flower and provide pollen and nectar over a long season. Plants in the legume and sunflower family, as well as fruit trees, attract bees.

* Never overhead water plants that provide pollen and nectar to bees. “If you saturate the pollen with water and dilute the nectar in plants, bees don’t want anything to do with it,” Mussen says.

* Provide bees with a source of water.

* Consider including vertical banks or small patches of bare earth, which are attractive to certain pollen bees for nesting.

* Leave a small area of the garden undisturbed, where native plants and a few weeds can grow. This will give bees food and an area in which to breed.

* Entice pollen bees into the backyard by providing them with scrap lumber that has several small holes drilled into it. A commonly liked diameter is five-sixteenths-inch and 3 to 5 inches deep.

Or provide bees with commercially made nesting blocks, often called “bee condos,” that are carried through a variety of mail-order suppliers.

* Avoid using pesticides in the garden. Using broad-spectrum pesticides on flowering plants can wipe out bees.

If you have a pest problem, use a light oil spray or insecticidal soap. Such products kill a bee if you hit it directly, but they won’t leave harmful residues. Just make sure to spray in evening hours, when most bees are dormant.

If you have to use pesticides, avoid spraying the blooms, Mussen says.

“Bees are like flying dust mops,” he explains. “If there is pesticide on the blooms, they’ll pick it up and take it back to the hive where it will get into the royal jelly and poison the bees.”

In the case of a pollen bee, the poison infects the nutritional dough ball and endangers the life of an unborn bee.

Be especially careful not to use products containing the chemical carbaryl, Mussen says. “This chemical will continue to poison the entire hive for up to a month.”