My Secrets to Attract Bees to My Garden

Seeing my orchard and my garden flowering and covered with bees makes me happy year after year. I plant a variety of fruits, veggies, annual, biennial and perennial plants to attract bees and actually all kinds of beautiful birds and butterflies. But this blog post is about bees only, so lets focus on them, yes?

Colorful plants like those of my Mammoth sunflowers do the trick:

I notice that bees love the flowers of my lime and lemon trees, they suck the nectar out of them and pollinate them:

The bees also love the flowers of my palm trees and the bottle brush tree. This spring my palm trees were flowering and attracted hundreds of bees:

If I want a ton of bees then I let some carrots to go full blossom and this is what I got this week:

BEES ON MY CARROT BLOSSOMS

Dra Martha A Castro Noriega

Bee Nutrition Facts:

All Bees get all of their carbohydrates from floral nectar and their protein from floral pollen.

Bees rely on flowers to supply them with the food they need to survive. Some flowers (e.g. tomatoes) provide only pollen, the main source of protein for bees. Other flowers (e.g. clovers) provide both nectar and pollen, thus providing both protein and carbohydrates.

Exotic Wisteria Flowers To Attract Bees

Lots of flowers provide abundant nectar and pollen for bees. All Bees get all of their carbohydrates from floral nectar and all of their protein from floral pollen.

Bees rely on flowers to supply them with the food they need to survive. Some flowers (e.g. tomatoes) provide only pollen, the main source of protein for bees. Other flowers (e.g. clovers) provide both nectar and pollen, thus providing both protein and carbohydrates.

Plant wisteria for bees and other pollinators

Wisteria is most fragrant. The blossoms abound with honey bees.

Swarm Of Bees They Come If You Create A Proper Ecosystem For Them

Flowers that Bees Love

• Alyssum.
• Agastache (anise hyssop)
• Asclepias (butterfly weed)
• Aster.
• Echinacea (coneflower)
• Geranium (cranesbill)
• Monarda (bee balm)
• Papaver (poppies)

Lavender

Sunflowers 

Coneflower

Salvia

Bees Love You with Sweet Honey

Spring is here and so the time to make your honey! If you have a swarm in your backyard I will tell you how to catch the bees. If you have a beekeeping then I assume you already know how to collect and pack your honey from the honeycombs.

Catching a swarm isn’t easy the first time you do it. When you realize the bees are coming out to swarm and not just working hard, you can try to settle them.

When the air becomes thick with bees, get a metal pan and spoon and start banging on it. This helps to settle the swarm into one place.

 

Once all the bees have settled into a ball, collect them into a hive box. Ideally, the swarm will have settled low enough to get the box under it to the position where you can brush them into the box. Sometimes if they settle on a limb you will have to cut that off and then shake that over the hive box.

Make sure the top is removed. Take a few frames out when you are brushing or shaking the bees. You can replace the lid when the bees start going in. You can tell if the queen has gone in because the other bees will start “bowing” to her as they’re going in.