Beneficial Insects: Not All Bugs are Bad
(Page 3 of 8)
April/May 1995
By John Vivian
Most flowering garden vegetables need to be cross-pollinated for best yield. I love my honeybees, but their effectiveness in pollinating the garden is exaggerated. Honeybees tend to gang up on the most abundant sources of nectar. For years I kept a hive between a pair of honeysuckle bushes—one white, one pink, which bloomed magnificently and smelled heavenly for two weeks in early spring. But the honeybees are too short-tongued to reach the nectar at the base of the long honeysuckle blossom, and they just zoomed off right between the bushes ...to the tops of neighboring basswood trees that blossomed odorlessly and inconspicuously at the same time as the honeysuckle.
Nonetheless, during a sunny day at peak bloom, the bushes hummed and buzzed to the point they appeared alive. The bushes were host to an amazing collection of insects. I got out my bug book and identified dozens of moths and butterflies, beetles, and bugs feasting on the nectar. Bumblebees came in large and small sizes and in several color combinations. Brown and black, yellow and white native bees appeared in sizes, shapes, and color combinations I never realized existed. There were flies that looked like bees and bees that mimicked flies and flies that were ordinary-housefly looking but for blazing red eyes or shimmering wings, plus wasps in all variations of size, color, body, and leg length. As I read on in the guide, I learned that a great many of these insects that sipped nectar as adults either raised their young on pollen and nectar (pollinating crops in the process) or hunted caterpillars, beetles, and other forest orchard, and garden pests to feed 'em on.
The best helpful-bug attractants I can recommend are sweet-smelling, nectarproviding flowers. I surround my garden spots with lilacs and other shrubs and perennials, and plant annuals in the rows. Cut flowers, hummingbirds, and the delights of colorful year-round bloom are added benefits.
The hundreds of species of solitary and small-colony native bees that rear their young on pollen and honey are far more important home-garden pollinators than the honeybee. They build a tremendous variety of nests: mud tubes, holes in trees, tubes of leaves, stalks of plants, and more. Among the best pollinators are the mining and boring bees. If you have a good clay bank on your property, leave it exposed. You'll find the surface shot-holed with beebrood chambers. To attract wood-boring bees to your garden, set fallen logs or old lumber planks on end and in the sun around the garden plot. Carpenter bees will chew out tunnels to rear their young. You can give them a hand by drilling quarterinchdiameter holes sloping up slightly into thick planks. If the bees don't use them, small mud nest-building wasps will.
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