Canadian Resources for Victory Gardens for Bees

 

 

I am about to do CBC interviews with weekend morning shows across Canada and I’ve put some links to here for extra information.

 

First of all, I would advise you to get yourself a good local wildflower/shrub/tree guide and support your local native plant nursery. Purchasing plants sold by a native nursery is a solid investment because of the expertise the growers have and because native plants will be less maintenance and more likely to thrive in your garden. Just ask the grower any questions you might have about the plants that would work for bees in your garden. This will help you use the plant charts in my book to help you plan your garden.

 

I also encourage you to join iNaturalist and start posting photos of the bees in your garden. It’s empowering and thrilling to get to know your local native bee species! I would encourage you to go to local parks with wild habitat and post the bees in the plants you see there. You can also use iNaturalist as a research tool to see the plants that bees are observed feeding on in your area.

 

Here are some resources for learning how to post bees on iNat:

 

How to make useful INaturalist observations

 

 Identification Etiquette on iNaturalist

 

Pollinator Partnership has some good gardening resources that are specific to regions within Canada. Check to see if they have a growing guide for your bioregion.

 

https://pollinatorpartnership.ca/en/find-your-roots

 

https://pollinatorpartnership.ca/en/ecoregional-planting-guides

 

This online tool can help you find a local native plant nursery near you. https://networkofnature.org/where-to-buy.htm/

 

Bee City Canada also has a tool for this: https://beecitycanada.org/native-plant-nurseries/

 

 A Trio of Alliums for Bees:

I will be talking about alliums for bees, and for western Canada, the nodding onion (Allium cernuum) is a fantastic native plant for bees. It’s beautiful and it’s edible too. For eastern Canada, you could plant the Canadian onion (Allium canadense). Chives (Allium schoenoprasum) are great to put in your garden for bees. They are edible, of course, but I think they’re pretty enough to put in a perennial border and butterflies love them too. You might not know this, but chives are native to many areas in North America and Europe. I also recommend a bee-loved allium cultivar called ‘Millenium’ which is long-blooming and hardy. Putting a trio of alliums in your garden will really help your local pollinators. Be sure to include one square meter of each of these alliums if your spaces allows it. Even one pot of chives on your balcony can make a difference!

 

 Some other native plants that are must-haves in your garden are fireweed, native asters and goldenrod, which are essential late summer plants for bees.

 

 Companion Books for Victory Gardens for Bees:

 In Ontario and the Great Lakes Region, you’ll want to buy a copy of A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee: Creating Habitat for Native Pollinators: Ontario and Great Lakes Edition by Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla.

 

For the prairies, you’ll want to buy a copy of Native Plants for the Short Season Yard: Best Picks for the Chinook and Canadian Prairie Zones by Lyndon Penner

 

 

 

 

Let's Celebrate World Bee Day on Tuesday May 20, 2025!

 

An ashy digger bee drinks some "lemonade" from lemon weed on Mt. Kobau. Notice the rusty long hairs on her back legs and the matching elbow pads!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's that time of the year again when a biodiverse collection of bees are actively foraging and nesting and keeping our ecosystems healthy and beautiful. Let's celebrate by going out and adding bee observations to iNaturalist. It's so fun to look at bees emerging all across Canada when the pussywillows are providing that early source of pollen and nectar for the earliest emerging guilds of bees and the queen bumble bees. I've been thinking about the earliest and latest plants for supporting bees. If you're on the coast of BC, you could think of bee season "from pussywillows to gumweed." Here in the Okanagan, I would say "from pusywillows to rabbitbrush." Those key early and late plants will vary in each bioregion. Can you find out which are the earliest and latest native bee plants in your area? Check iNaturalist and see which observations are the earliest and latest. Generalist bees like bumble bees need forage from those earliest plants all through the early pussywillows to the late goldenrods and asters when the newly emerged gynes are fattening up for hibernation. Think of it as the "gyne to gyne" period.

 

We've almost passed the gyne season here in the Okanagan and the little worker bumble bees are bringing the pollen back to the nest to feed their baby sisters. When I'm identifying bees on iNaturalist I like to add information about the plants the bees are visiting and whether they are collecting pollen. On Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, the workers and solitary bees are mining the camas pollen right now. Here in the south Okanagan, the silky lupins are starting to bloom and provide pollen for worker bumble bees. On the coast and the interior, citizen scientists are making quite a few observations of the death camas bee. If you do come upon a patch of the flowers, keep you eye out for these toxic-tolerant mining bees!

As you can see, on the Native Bee Society of BC Bee Tracker Project we are close to the 65, 000 mark for bee observations in BC. Let's blast past that milestone to honour World Bee Day!!!! We want to see your bees! We want to ID your bees! And please let us know which flowers you are seeing the bees feeding on. It really helps us to have this information, if you know it.

 

And please check out Bob McDougall's World Bee Day Project which is inclusive of other pollinators. In the project journal he writes eloquently about why we need to protect and celebrate these keystone species. And you may find some rare insects when you're looking for bees. I've found the nine-spotted ladybug, Behr's hairstreak butterfly and a rare bee fly when I'm out taking photos of bees. (I consider these FOBs or Friends of Bees!)

 

 

I'd like to thank all the folks across Canada that are adding bee observations to iNaturalist. Together we can protect and celebrate over 800 species of native bees that live here. And remember . . . every day is a bee day!!!!