COLUMBUS, Ohio — Bees are vital to the pollination of crops across the country but must find flora beyond the boundaries of the farm before they can return to help in the pollination process.

 

Researchers and bee experts from Ohio and Kentucky have compiled a list of bee-friendly plants for growers in the Ohio Valley region.

“We tell farmers and even urban growers that when they plant their vegetable gardens they should incorporate some flowers with their plants, to assist in the pollination process,” said Terry Lieberman-Smith, vice president of the Ohio State Beekeepers Assoc.

“The bees naturally don’t like all the herbicides and fungicides placed on the fields, but along the fence rows there are flowering plants that farmers can utilize that will attract bees to their acreage.”

Lieberman-Smith offers growers an endless list of flower-producing plants, many unheard of by most growers and others that are vegetable-producing. Her list includes such varieties such as ox hart tomato, Danish flag poppy, money plant, blue star morning glory and King of the Garden lima beans.

“Even if the farmers have a small garden, by incorporating some of these highly flower-producing plants into rows of their garden, it will encourage bees to take not just one visit to the garden but many visits, and the more visits there are, the more pollination will take place,” she said.

Others on her list of bee-attracting plants include coreopsis, Scarlet O’Hara, Chinese lanterns and mixed spider flower. University of Kentucky doctoral student Bernadette Mach is spearheading a similar but much broader bee conservation effort at her school by using science-based plant recommendations. She began her research project in the summer of 2014 and it’s the first comprehensive study of its kind. Hers focused on trees and shrubs.

 

“In the past five to 10 years, it’s estimated that pollinator populations have declined between 30 to 60 percent, depending on the pollinator,” Mach said.

“While much of the attention has focused on dwindling honeybee populations due to colony collapse disorder, bumblebees, mason bees and other solitary bee species are on the decline.

“Habitat loss due to urban and suburban sprawl is one of the main reasons.

Our research provides a way to help restore the habitat and resources of bees and other pollinators, while diversifying urban landscapes with horticulturally desirable plants.”

In her study Mach took visual counts of bees visiting various trees and shrubs in locations around Lexington and Cincinnati, two urban centers relatively close in distance with comparable landscape plantings. She identified 50 bees visiting the plant at each site, characterizing both the relative attractiveness of about 75 different species of woody landscape plants, as well as types of bees that visit each plant across a total of about 375 different landscape sites

 

“The list includes bee-friendly ratings of plants, along with the bloom times of each,” she explained. “We identified a number of horticulturally desirable but underutilized plants as ‘bee magnets.’”

Mach’s full list of bee-friendly trees and shrubs titled Plants Bees Like Best is available online at http://growwise.org/ChallengerToolkit