Allergic people beware! Bee gardens are a new gardening trend

You’ve probably read in the paper or seen in the news a story about the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder in the United States, where huge numbers of honeybees around the United States were suddenly dying without explanation.

People concerned about the issue are now creating bee friendly gardens, according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

After reading about the distressed honeybees, Janet Allen decided to give up pesticides last summer and turn her 14,400-square-foot yard in Syracuse, N.Y., into an insect habitat. The retired software engineer filled her front yard with beds of colorful plants favored by honeybees, such as milkweed, penstemon and goldenrod (she bought unusual varieties so neighbors wouldn’t recognize them as roadside weeds). She also put in half-a-dozen “bee boxes” that she bought online for about $30 a piece. The boxes attract some native species that, unlike hive-dwelling honeybees, prefer to go it alone, nesting in individual burrows in logs or holes in the soil. Her husband, a lawyer, built two more this spring from scratch, using scrap lumber and elderberry bush stems.

The couple’s two adult children think this preoccupation with bees — the yard now attracts dozens of the furry pollinators — is “crazy,” but Ms. Allen considers it a higher calling: “It’s part of our responsibility as parents to leave a living planet.”

Janet Allen’s bee garden attracts dozens of the pollinating insects.
While it’s unclear what, if anything, backyard bee gardens will be able to do to stop the decline of the honeybee, there’s no question that the insect is in trouble. Though periodic die-offs have occurred before, most recently in the ’80s, the current bee decline, which started about five years ago, took a turn for the worse last fall. According to the Apiary Inspectors of America, about a quarter of the 2.4 million commercial hives have been lost since then.

Such efforts have a direct connection to America’s dinner tables. One-third of the food eaten in this country is pollinated by insects, according to the Department of Agriculture, and the honeybee is responsible for 80% of that pollination, without which plants won’t bear fruits, seeds, vegetables or nuts. The honeybee is the country’s foremost crop pollinator, says Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeper Federation. But if native bee populations are robust, Mr. Fore says, “we won’t starve.”