These large bees are round and fuzzy with short, stubby wings.

There are about 45 species of bumblebees (Bombus) in the United States alone. For fall, when it gets harder to find nectar, try planting fall bloomers such as salvia, wild geranium, anemone, basil, chives, cilantro, and parsley.For early and late summer, plant coneflowers, sunflowers, black-eyed susans, bee balm, gentian, larkspur, or tall phlox.For spring, try planting crocuses, Virginia bluebells, lungwort, comfrey, hellebore, California poppies, columbine, low-growing phlox, or spring ephemerals.Unfortunately, this ability also makes them more vulnerable to agricultural pesticides and herbicides, which are usually sprayed in early morning and later in the day to avoid harming the honeybees that are active during the middle of the day. Bumblebees are able to fly in cooler temperatures and lower light conditions than other bees, making them among the first pollinators you’ll see in the spring and the last ones flying in the fall. Plan your garden to have a long season of bloom. However, bumblebees are not fussy anything that produces nectar and pollen works for them! If you plant even a small area or a few containers with flowering plants, the bees will find them. To attract bumblebees and other native bee species, consider native plants-such as asters, coneflowers ( Echinacea spp.), lupines, bee balm ( Monarda spp.), and spring ephemerals. Crops such as tomatoes, peppers, berries, and cranberries bear better fruits if they are buzz pollinated. The flowers on berries are enclosed, so it takes a bumblebee’s long “tongue” to get to the plant’s nectar.īumblebees have to work harder than ever to find food and shelter due to habitat loss and the overuse of pesticides. If you can get one to hold still long enough, look closely and you’ll notice the pollen basket (or “corbicula”) on its rear legs where it stashes a load of pollen to carry back to the nest. Bumblebees’ wings beat more than 130 times per second! They perform a unique service called “buzz pollination” by grabbing the pollen producing part of the plant in their jaws and vibrating their wing muscles to loosen trapped pollen. Bottle gentian flowersįemale worker bees do the collecting of nectar and pollen. The bottle gentian (Gentiana andrewsii), for example, has developed bottle-shape flowers that never open fully, which means that a strong bee must pry its way into the flower to pollinate it. Many crops are well suited to natural pollination by bumblebees, including cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, seed crops, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, melons, and squash. They are especially attracted to tube-shaped flowers and some flowers have evolved to be almost exclusively pollinated by these beefy bees. They mainly forage for pollen rather than nectar, and transfer more pollen to the pistils of the flowers with each visit. Yes! Bumblebees are excellent pollinators-much more efficient pollinators than honeybees, in fact. There were so many bumblebees and they moved so fast from flower to flower in search of pollen and nectar that it was hard to get one to stand still long enough to get a good picture. They are fast workers and, because of their larger bodies, can carry larger loads. After reading about the drastic decline in bumblebee populations in my state, I feared I would not see the black-and-yellow bombers this spring, so I was greatly relieved when they visited my early-blossoming ‘Purple Gem’ and ‘Olga Mezitt’ rhododendrons.

Bumble bee sting