How gardeners can help native bees in Tucson yards

Many people conflate all bees together, but native solitary bees are actually very different from honeybees. Solitary bees are native, while honeybees are introduced species.

Honeybees in Arizona are either domesticated or wild, and the wild ones are pretty much all Africanized. I wrote about honeybees in my earlier article. Native bees, however, are a completely different story.

Native bees are very calm and docile, since they live on their own and have no hive to defend. They live short lives, about a year in total, of which about six weeks is in the adult phase which we see. In this phase, they fly around collecting pollen and nectar for food, and then reproduce.

Arizona has about 1,300 species of solitary native bees, and the US has about 3,600 total species of bees of which 90% are solitary. Worldwide there are around 20,000 species. Arizona has about 10 major groups of bees (including honeybees). These include bees like leafcutter, mason and squash bees.

Unfortunately, due to factors like climate change, pesticides and loss of habitat, as well as introduced diseases, many bees are in trouble, and it’s very difficult to study solitary native bees on a large scale to document the true extent of the issue. The good news is that gardeners are in a great position to help them out, by providing habitat and food. The key to helping native bees is to provide them with their natural food source — native flowering plants. These plants, which have co-evolved with native bees, will be the best food and habitat sources for our fuzzy flying friends.

Another way to help bees is to provide them with the places they need to reproduce. About 70% of native bees are ground-nesting bees, which means it’s vital to keep some bare, loose soil for them in your yard to allow them to dig their nests. This is one exception to my “always mulch” rule. Leave a patch of bare ground, and make sure it’s in a well-drained, warm spot. You can also have a 2-foot deep sandy loam pit in your yard for the bees. The Xerces Society has great tips on building bee nesting sites.

Some native bees may cut out circular pieces of your plants’ leaves to help them with their nest construction. If you see this, it’s a great sign that you have a happy bee population in your yard. Don’t worry, the leaf cuts don’t permanently damage your plants.

The other 30% of solitary native bees build their nests in various cavities, including small holes in dead trees, yucca stems or abandoned beetle burrows. If you have a larger property, consider leaving these stems and even dead trees in place to give native bees a place to build their burrows. They may also burrow in your plant stems. Again, don’t worry about this, and be happy that bees have chosen your yard to reproduce in — you must be doing something right.

To give native bees the greatest amount of help you will need a wide variety of native plants in your yard. It’s important to select a grouping of plants that will provide pollinators with blooms all year round. If you have limited space or budget, choose plants that bloom at atypical times of year — like November through February. This will give your local bees a food source when few flowers are present in the desert.

Make sure you get your plants from reputable, local nurseries that don't use pesticides, or you will be doing more harm than good. As a rule, if you see some bugs on the plant, that's probably a good sign. You can check out my earlier article "How to have an Earth-friendly garden in Tucson" to help you choose a good place to buy your plants.

One way to design a great bee garden is to get help from experts like Tucson Audubon Society, which can help you design a pollinator garden to fit your space and provide the best habitat you can. You can either use the resources on their website at Habitat at Home or hire them to design and install the whole thing.

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If you choose to design your own bee garden, another great resource of plant names is the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s list of native plants for pollinators which you can search through by bloom time. Another helpful resource is the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s database which you can also search by bloom time. Note that the link provided will return a list of native plants in all of Arizona, so be sure to select ones that will do well in our low desert.

Arizona Native Plant Society’s plant list is the definitive guide to native plants. You can search by type of plant, sun exposure, water needs and other characteristics, but unfortunately not by bloom time. When you click on a plant it gives you the flowering season. It’s also a very useful resource.

For more resources and other organizations and businesses in town that can help you design a great bee garden, take a look at my article “Choosing native plants for wildlife gardens in Tucson: Plant lists are crucial.”

Our payoff for helping native bees (and other pollinators) is more beautiful flowers and fruit — and lots of other benefits, too. About a third of our food comes directly from plants pollinated by bees, mostly native solitary bees, according to an article published in November 2016 in the journal "Ambio."

Bees also help increase the biodiversity of our food plants and help restore ecosystems. It’s estimated that pollinating insects (bees and also certain flies) provide us with between $235 billion and $577 billion worth of annual global food production. Again, much of this work is done by native bees.

How to help native bees

• Provide habitat: Bare soil for ground bees, nest boxes for wood-nesting bees, and lots of flowering native plants.
• Welcome the cut leaves and don’t worry about the damage. It won’t permanently hurt your plants.
• Provide safe, fresh water sources. Bees need some pebbles or rocks on which to safely perch to drink. You can also leave a floating item in the water for them, like a cork or some foam, like a cut piece of a pool noodle.
• Provide food. Plant native plants in groups that offer seasonal variety of flowers with year-round blooms in your garden.
• Do not use pesticides. These have been shown to harm all small animals (and many larger animals too), but particularly insect pollinators.
• Support native bee research and conservation. Check out the Tucson Bee Collaborative.

More native bee resources

• Identifying Arizona bees 
• Wild bee conservation, from the Xerces Society
• Building nesting areas in your yard for bees
• Learn more about our native bees from this article by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
• Tucson Audubon’s information sheet on native bees