Tag - gardening

The Bee Inspired Garden welcomes pollinators of all types.

gardening for bees

The Bee Inspired Garden: spectacular blooms for bee...

6 months ago

8 Comments

A nativar is actually a cultivar, a cross-bred plant.

gardening for bees

Nativars for pollinators: the truth about cross-bred...

6 months ago

15 Comments

Seed balls are easy and fun to make, even if you're not a kid.

bee forage • gardening for bees

Bee-friendly fun: how to make seed balls for your...

6 months ago

6 Comments

bees in art

A close-knit family of bees

4 years ago

6 Comments

Bees and their queen on a honeycomb. Pixabay

attracting wild pollinators

Capital Growth yields . . . veggies?

11 years ago

5 Comments

pollen

Honey bees all tangled up in blue pollen: bee-witching!

12 years ago

15 Comments

miscellaneous musings • plant-pollinator mutualisms

The essence of beekeeping is not in the hive

13 years ago

2 Comments

bee forage • pollination • wild bees and native bees

Plant a garden and they will come

13 years ago

1 Comment

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. This book started zillions of people on their path to beekeeping. If you haven't read it, you should.

QueenSpotting: Meet the Remarkable Queen Bee and Discover the Drama at the Heart of the Hive by Hilary Kearney. You have to be a scrooge not to love this book. It even includes 48 queenspotting challenges.

The Bees in Your Backyard by Wilson & Carril. If you have any interest at all in the "other bees," you need this book. These are the bees we need to save.

Regardless of dictionaries, we have in entomology a rule for insect common names that can be followed. It says: If the insect is what the name implies, write the two words separately; otherwise run them together. Thus we have such names as house fly, blow fly, and robber fly contrasted with dragonfly, caddicefly, and butterfly, because the latter are not flies, just as an aphislion is not a lion and a silverfish is not a fish. The honey bee is an insect and is preeminently a bee; “honeybee” is equivalent to “Johnsmith.”

—From Anatomy of the Honey Bee by Robert E. Snodgrass

The non-native European Honey Bee is the state insect of:

Arkansas
Georgia
Kansas
Louisiana
Maine
Mississippi
Missouri
Nebraska
New Jersey
North Carolina
Oklahoma
South Dakota
Tennessee
Utah
Vermont
West Virginia
Wisconsin

Not one native bee is a state insect. The closest relative of a North American native bee to make the list is the Tarantula Hawk Wasp, the state insect of New Mexico.

Minnesota now has a state bee as well as a state insect. Bombus affinis, the Rusty-Patched Bumble Bee, has been so honored. Good work, Minnesota!

Connecticut’s state insect is the European “praying” mantis. Although they are beneficial insects, they are not native to North America.