Yardsmart: The beauty of bee gardens

When the first flowers of Monarda didyma bloomed, I rediscovered the wonder of bees. Sure, I shared the grade-school fears of stings, yet there were bees I had never seen before on this prairie perennial also known as "bee balm." The insects ranged from tiny ones the size of a mosquito to wasplike banded beauties.

The same thing occurred when my Queen's wreath vine, Antigonon leptopus, burst into summer bloom. This is also a native plant, but it hails from the dry washes of the American Southwest. Every day, for months on end, the dangling tresses of magenta blossoms were alive with bees, particularly in the lingering cool of the summer mornings.

Draped over the driveway, my shrubby Tecoma "sunset" dripped so much nectar from the large flowers that the concrete became sticky. Again, the bees arrived. This time, they were big, black carpenter bees, which resemble a cross between horseflies and bumblebees. Their fat bodies can always be found buzzing slowly around these orange trumpet flowers. Carpenter bees love this shrub so much that they burrowed into my rotting garage eaves and the soft wood of an African mask I hung in the garden. It's great fun to watch these big black insects exit out the nostrils of that abstract face.

These three examples illustrate just how closely some plants are tied to these insects. There are an astonishing 5,000 different species of bees native to North America. Entomologists estimate there are 1,500 more species yet to be discovered. The majority of them are solitary and do not live in hives. Instead, they nest in isolation, the females laying many eggs before the end of their brief life span.

Non-hiving bees nest underground, in foliage or rotting wood. Their favorite sites are worm-eaten wood and old woodpecker holes. After mating, the female finds an empty tunnel or crevice and lines it with leaves or flower petals. Next, she gathers both flower pollen and nectar to stock the nursery. After laying a single egg in this carefully prepared nest, she will plug the entrance and fly away, never to return. She will repeat this process many times during her life.

Sadly, humans don't exactly love bees. Recollections of stings make them unpopular in gardens despite the fact that they are so essential to pollination. That fear is understandable to those who are allergic, but for the rest of us, bees should be highly valued. They are simply not aggressive unless molested. Bees are far more interested in feeding than anything else. Only the Africanized honeybees are dangerous, but even those rarely attack unless we come too close to their hives. Only female bees actually bear stingers.