Picture Sundays: A Native Bee Hotel

December 16, 2012

...Don’t know much about this native bee house other than that it’s near Paris. For more info on native bee habitats, see our post from earlier this year. Update: reader Drew left a comment to say that this habitat is in the Jardin des Plantas in Paris which is attached to the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (http://www.mnhn.fr/le-museum/). Thanks to David Dalzel for the tip....

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A House for Native Bees and Insects

Mr. Homegrown

September 3, 2015

Animals, Bees, Gardening, Insects

7 Comments

...fe: insects and birds in abundance. In addition to lots of life-attracting plants, the NHM folks have created habitats for insects like the one in the pictured above. These cute little native bee habitats sit atop a 8 foot four by four. I’m going to steal the design for our front yard. As soon as I can get Sketchup working again on my computer I’ll draw up some plans and make them available. In the meantime see the fact sheets on the Xerces Societ...

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White Sage and Bees and our other sage friends

Mrs. Homegrown

May 14, 2013

Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, Native Plants

25 Comments

...ing in Southern California. I enjoy the aromatics of our Mediterranean and native chaparral plants as much as the bees do. Here’s what we’ve got going right now–and I think I’m going to add more this fall. Below is our native black sage, Salvia mellifera, just coming into flower. The bees like this sage, too. (They like all sages). This one arranges its flowers in little sipping cups for them. It has dark green leaves, which is less common than gr...

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We are all gardeners

Mrs. Homegrown

April 2, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening, Thoughtstylings

13 Comments

...riety of means to both irrigate the garden and charge the groundwater. The plants in the loving landscape promote biodiversity and the local ecology. They are largely native, but not dogmatically so. The landscape represents the unique spirit and history of the region. The plants serve the larger ecology, feeding insects and birds and providing habitat for small animals, birds and reptiles. Loving landscapes join together from house to house to fo...

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Bidens rebuttal

Mrs. Homegrown

November 8, 2016

Gardening, Least Favorite Plant

5 Comments

...busy cloud of insects buzzing around this mystery plant: honeybees, little native bees and flies and these tiny orange-ish moths that I’ve never seen before. Good pollinator plants remind me of space stations (the kind in movies, that is): complex structures full of vehicles of different sizes approaching, docking, departing, filling the airspace with frantic activity all the day long.This was definitely a good pollinator plant, an important sourc...

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