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I planted a melon on the 5th floor window of the apartment building in the middle of the concrete jungle where I live. I was in constant angst about how on earth would I pollinate the small flowers. I even bought a small paintbrush, just in case.

And then small, black, solitary bees and other unknown insects started to swarm the yellow flowers. Later on spiders weaved their nets around the flowers, so a small ecosystem started to form. In the end it successfully grew three very tasty melons weighing around 2kg each.

So, it's quite interesting that in the middle of a city, where you rarely even see insects, just by planting an expansive fruit plant, brings in a lot of visitors from the insect world.

As an added plus the family living on the 4th floor started complaining that the plant started to grow around their windows and I should do something with it...

I've seen an amazing variety of bees and wasps since we planted a native wildflower garden. They may not be unknown to science but most are new to me and they seem to change very few weeks, depending on what's blooming.
That's a wonderful thing you did - it's helping the bees and other pollinators and bringing you enjoyment.

To anyone else wanting to do similar - PLEASE be sure to plant only species and varieties native to YOUR area. It's much more beneficial all around than random "wildflowers" that are native to who knows where.

I'm a committee to volunteer looking after a graveyard down the road from me.

We've just gained permission from the city council that we can make adaptions to the landscape including planting floral life that encourage wildlife, Bird boxes and Bat Boxes are allowed too. Sort of excited as this ties in to my life dream of having an animal sanctuary.

> PLEASE be sure to plant only species and varieties native to YOUR area. It's much more beneficial all around than random "wildflowers"

I get the sentiment but the swarm of bees* on my Russian sage, some 9000km away from Moscow, makes one wonder about this advice.

*all sorts, not only European honeybees

The problem is that non-native species, planted with the best of intentions, can become invasive and choke out native populations. See for example the Buddleia, which in the UK was often lauded as 'the butterfly bush' and which is now a massive nuisance across the nations railways and wildlife reserves.
I have Buddleia in my garden (which otherwise has a native focus). It's not at all invasive where I am, in upstate NY, probably due to the cold winters. In a colder winter it dies back to the roots and may not survive at all.

Now, purple loosestrife is still all over, despite the biocontrol. And don't get me started about Phragmites or Alliaria petiolata (garlic mustard).

Similarly, birds love Asian honeysuckle in the U.S., but the fruit is basically sugar water and the plant aggressively crowds out most native plants.
I figure that native plants give an edge to native pollinators. The explosion of spotted lantern flies shows how non-native plants can make things worse. Also, I'm ignorant when it comes to ecology. So I won't pretend to know how many roles a native plant plays throughout its lifecycle, let alone which non-native plants can fit those roles while looking pretty.
From what I've learned, there are generalist pollinators (i.e. european honeybees) and specialist pollinators (i.e. your local native bees). Generalists can use any plant, but specialists require particular plants to complete their life cycles. So your intuition is basically correct; the honeybees won't care, but the native ones will appreciate a native plant.
How do I even find this out?

When I ask the search engine about native plants in the nearest metropoly, closest I get is someone selling seed packs, without any clear scientific basis for their being native.

Your local university should have a horticulture department with a list. A nursery not attached to a grocery or hardware store will likely have a list as well. Usually they will label the origin of each plant.
In the US, the state school with the best engineering programs will also be the one with the agriculture focus.

There are also plant/seed vendors who can tell you about what they sell that's native where you live. Like this (scroll down to see map!):

https://www.everwilde.com/store/Nelumbo-lutea-WildFlower-See...

My city has a designated group of people focused on ecological restoration of all sorts of public spaces. They’re called the “Parks Service” which doesn’t fully entail their role, but they’re all very experienced and educated regarding local native ecology.

I was surprised we have this, so you might as well. I only discovered it because I volunteer to help restore public spaces and had the good fortune of meeting the city’s team on one occasion. They’re awesome. I wish I’d known sooner. It’s an incredible resource to have.

Is easier than ever to identify a plant with internet, but some time ago people bough handbooks that provided decades of joy and discoveries. Support the writers that provide a better experience showing you the whole picture instead a small piece without context.
There's probably a local organization dedicated to native plants. In Indiana, for example: https://indiananativeplants.org
Honestly, it's mostly a lost cause and maybe a dubious one, if you walk into any woods or meadow in the northeast you'll find "invasive" species everywhere... and native pollinators all over them. Actively suppressing those non-natives may actually do more harm than good.

My little hobby farm is covered in invasive comfrey, a non-native variety of it ("Russian" comfrey, a wild hybrid.) Anywhere I don't mow, it pops up. It blooms all season, little pink flowers full of nectar. The native bumble bees go crazy for it. (photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/C79PJpdRzuD/)

Native plants are great, but there's a lot to pick apart in the native-vs-invasives narrative. It's really not that black and white.

EDIT: the reverse is also true... European honeybees go completely bonkers for the (very native) goldenrod that is all over the place right now. Makes great photos (https://www.instagram.com/p/C_WAGSmxs0K/?img_index=1)

Many invasives are everywhere, indeed. But I don't think it's necessary to be fatalistic about it.

My point, though, is that if you are actively planting things, you should use ones that are endemic to your area. And why not, you're tipping the scales ever so slightly towards the natives.

We hike a lot, usually twice a weekend, and whenever we can, we pull an invasive tansy which is hepatoxic to deer and other native animals. Since we started this practice a couple years ago, there seems to be a noticeable reduction of tansy along our more frequented trails.

Another non-native around here is a European beachgrass which early settlers planted to "stabilize" the sand dunes along beaches. It has done that for sure but has also taken over and become a monoculture and destroyed the dune dynamics and crowded out all the native plants. It's extremely hard to remove and require either a lot of hand digging or herbicide application. Over many years of work, the situation is improving though.

Also, "invasive" has gained the connotation of "bad" for some reason, as though regions and their flora/fauna do not change and have not changed over time. Species invade. Such is the ecosystem.
Definitely. Obviously the rate of change is crazy higher than anything pre-anthropocene but... but it's more broadly just part of biology.

imho there's a kind of unfortunate essentialist philosophy which runs rampant among some "ecologists" and which has seeped into the public sphere... which believes that "nature" is a self-balancing system, and it is only our interference (as something "outside" nature) that breaks this. And this gets tied into the "natives" vs "invasives" dialog, as well. I think this is profoundly wrong. Nature is chaos. (Said in Werner Herzog voice, or something).

Consider that the ice age only ended just over 10,000 years ago -- which is an extremely short time ago in geological and evolutionary terms -- and every forest, meadow or natural space you see in (temperate North America and Europe at least) is very new and was "invaded" after the glaciers melted and as the climate warmed. In some cases quite recently.

Yes… but that delicate balance they describe in the article? The symbiotic relationship between one specific bee that only pollinates one specific flower? That delicate balance is interrupted when we introduce non-native plants. It’s not guaranteed to be a problem, nor a catastrophic one. But sometimes it is. It’s simply better to select local plants when possible because we don’t yet understand all the relationships that make established ecosystems humm.

I’m not nazi about it, there are plenty of nonnative species in my garden, but we have the awesome tiny bees that visit one specific tiny purple flower. I’d hate to crowd them out by accident so I try to plant local varieties when I can. And the bees we get are fantastic. I can’t wait to start identifying them.

"Quantifying Threats to Imperiled Species in the United States: Assessing the relative importance of habitat destruction, alien species, pollution, overexploitation, and disease"

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/48/8/607/232411?...

exactly. climate change for example demands a change of fauna in certain regions. i live in europe and I had to find out that many trees that I thought where endemic are not. oranges or apples are a good example. or mullberry.
There is a large body of peer-reviewed research showing the enormous damage that invasives species to do ecosystems. Pollinators will use non-native species if they don't have anything else available, but pollinator diversity and abundance is always less than what you'd find in a native-dominated plant assemblage.
Yep, I have a huge native plant garden and some non-native basil I've let flower and the native garden might as well not exist to the bees. There's 10-15 bees on the basil from sunup to sundown.
Aside: I planted a "columnar" basil this year I got from a local grower. Not sure of species, etc but small little leaves, seems way more drought and heat tolerant (I've completely neglected it) and one thing that's great about it is that it seems to just.. not... go to seed and flower.

I always end up with too much basil and it goes bonkers all over the garden. Pine nuts and parmesan are way too expensive to make pesto at any quantity to keep up with the basil.

What kinds of bees though? Could they be driving out native bees that prefer native flowers? Just saying, it's complicated
> They may not be unknown to science

You might be surprised. If it's something you want to pursue, or just for general interest, iNaturalist and its related Seek app are the best places I know to start - if it's common, they'll tell you what it is; if not, there's nowhere better in the world for an entomological layperson to reach those who might be able to say - or who might be very interested in the fact that they can't!

I was astonished when I read "Life on a Little Known Planet: A Biologist's View of Insects and Their World" [1]. The author was an entomologist who was one of the world's foremost experts on parasitic wasps.

He'd put out traps to catch flying insects at his home over the summer in, if I recall correctly, New England, and often find ones that he didn't recognize. He'd even find parasitic wasps he didn't recognize. Upon further checking he'd find that many of these were unknown to science.

I'd always thought that if you wanted to find insects unknown to science you'd have to go to isolated areas that had not been well explored.

There was a good illustration in the book of how little we know. There was some invasive insect that was causing a lot of damage to California orange crops [2]. The invasive insect was native to Florida. In Florida its population was kept under control by a species of parasitic wasps that laid their eggs in its larvae which became wasp food before they could mature and start attacking the orange crop.

A lot of money was spent to import those wasps into California and release them. This kind of biological pest control is attractive because parasites are often very specific about what species they will use as a host, which was the case with these wasps, so this should be safe as far as species other than the invasive one are concerned. The parasites aren't going to switch to some native host.

They were correct in that the parasites didn't go after anything else, so caused no harm. But they also didn't go after the invasive insect. They just didn't lay eggs and died off.

Eventually someone figured out why it hadn't worked. It turned out that what we had thought was a species of invasive insect turned out to be two very closely related species, call them A and B. The parasitic wasp species that laid eggs in their larvae also turnout out to be two species. One of the wasp species laid eggs in A larvae, and only A larvae, and the in B larvae, and only B larvae.

All the invaders in California were from A, and all the wasps they trapped in Florida and sent to California were from the species that lays eggs in B.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/d...

[2] I read the book a long time ago. I may be misremembering the specific crop, and the specific types of insects involved.

Evans is a treasure, and "little-known planet" is right. Too, as phylogenetics continues to overturn the classic understanding of taxonomic relationships, the family often seems to grow about as much more complex as less, of late. It is actually getting clearer, but there are also whole taxa whose existence can be inferred from genomic evidence but not demonstrated because no example has yet been found. By all impressions, it's a wildly exciting field of study in recent decades, if not one seeing the concomitant level of investment.

If you find the subject compels, the next place I'd point you would be Seirian Sumner's quite recent and frankly outstanding Endless Forms, which offers both a worthy successor to Evans' perspective on the hymenopterans, and a view of the astonishing breadth of the field's development since Evans' own day - and no shortage of remarkable anecdotes, either. (Hymenopterology has a habit of furnishing these, I find! Search "Polydnaviriformdae" some time...)

I did the same. Ripped up my grass lawn and replaced with lavender, clover, roses, etc.

Not only does it look better, but it’s less maintenance. I had a variety of bees, butterflies, and Anna’s Hummingbirds visit this year. It was a treat to watch!

Flowers are one thing, but what stops many species from coming back is the lack of free-flowing rivers and the mud they need to dig or build their nests.
Yeah that and piles of decaying brush / wood / sticks, etc. (E.g. carpenter bees).
We intentionally keep a bunch of decaying logs and sticks in our yard for this purpose.

I also accidentally left out a 2x4s we pulled out of an old wall (thus full of nail holes). Almost every hole, big or small, now has some kind of cap from solitary bees laying their eggs in it.

this may be soapboxy, but this is a subject i feel strongly about

if you haven't already watched Doug Tallamy's talk "Nature's Best Hope", it is a fantastic watch. he has done it many times, for many different associations. you may have to skip some of their long intros.

he also started Homegrown National Park, which is a project to get people excited about replacing some of their grass with native plants, and also reducing the number of invasive plants. if you've watched "Nature's Best Hope", this will make sense

if you're planning on planting anything, please visit https://www.nwf.org/Garden-for-Wildlife/About/Native-Plants/... and try to pick keystone plants. you can find keystone plants by ecoregion there. of course, there are plants that support a small group of specialist bees, and they need love too.

Here in Southern California, its all European Honeybee. So many of them, hives are everywhere, any irrigation box that isn't fully closed will be a new home for the bees. They are constant annoyance at picnics trying to get anything sweet like BBQ sauce/Ketchup or your drink. Remember one trip to Legoland, the garbage cans were filled with honeybees that where feeding on the bbq sauce on discarded plates. Makes me think twice about eating local honey.

Don't see many wild bees though i do see an occasional tarantula hawk who like to grab a drink from the pool. I wonder how much pressure European Honeybee puts on the local wild bee population.

I always get a kick out of anecdotal experiences like this (in a good way).

I can't count how many modelling studies and news articles I've seen over the years claiming that honey bees were going extinct, murder hornets were going to wipe them all out, etc.

Nature just isn't that simple, and attempting to model it and claim specific predictions of the future is insanely difficult if not impossible.

It would be terrible for the entire ecosystem if honey bees disappeared, don't get me wrong. But eventually we have to start taking ecological modelling for what it is, an attempt at boiling the entire planet to a simplified mathematical equation that results in a final answer.

the problem with „ bee goes extinct“ is it is not honeybees. they are well. its all other bees. but yes most articles focus wrongly on honeybees.
Everyone conflates bees with the honeybee. In California, half the wild bee species have gone extinct or endangered. One bee we don't see any more is the California Bumblebee, i haven't seen one in a couple years. 20 years ago, i would see them all the time in our backyard.
this stat is totally wild to me:

> 100 native orchard mason bees can do the equivalent pollination work of tens of thousands of honeybees

While fascinating, this is the kind of information I wish would have been buried in the article in four-point font, where it can't hurt anyone. Because you know someone will read it and then get starry-eyed about the possibilities of min/maxing the capabilities of a super-bee pollinator via cross-species breeding, gene manipulation, etc.

And that's how you get killer bees. Again.

That's a great username for that sort of post.
No one who understands the hymenopterans can make this mistake. No one who could make this mistake understands the hymenopterans. The risk you see isn't present.
My neighbors keep bees on the roof and I love seeing them happy in my backyard
I saw a lot more bees on the east coast this summer. so wonderful to see
Very cool article, but brutal ending:

> But the first camas meadow that made her dance with joy? That same spot is now an outdoor Rotary fitness park, carpeted not in flowers and bees but in mowed lawn and outdoor rubber flooring.