Betty Montgomery: Are honeybees dying off? It depends on who you ask.

Native and managed bees provide important pollination assistances.  They are an essential part of our lives by helping pollinate crops, flowers to flourish, and they allow the natural world around us to continue to thrive.  The species of wild bees has declined over the past 50 years with a few going extinct while there has been a rise in hobby beekeeping.

The causes of the decline in the wild species are patchy and incomplete.  A few of the causes are said to be the loss of habitat, parasites, pesticides, pest, pathogens, and the decrease of natural food.  I am fortunate to have a wild group of bees that come to my garden each year and stay for just short of a month. It is fascinating to watch them.  They come about the first of April, hundreds or thousands of them.  They hover above the ground about 6 inches, then after a week or two, they dig holes in the ground, they lay their eggs and then they leave and return the following year.  You can walk through the area where they are hovering and they do not bother you or sting you.  I find their activity mesmerizing and do not want to do anything to upset this annual event.

Honeybee keepers find honeybees just as fascinating and raising honeybees has become an increasingly popular hobby for many people.  I have two cousins that keep bees and they are often talking about how captivating they are, what they are doing with them at that time, and what they are feeding on presently, plus other things.

Honeybees are social and cooperative insects.  A honeybee colony typically consists of three kinds of adult bees: workers, drones, and a queen.

Workers are the only bees that most people ever see. These bees are females that are not sexually developed. Workers forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean, circulate air by beating their wings, and they preform many other societal functions.

The drones are lazy boys. Their only work is to mate with a queen and only the fittest few will get this pleasure. Otherwise, they sit around the hive being looked after by the workers or hang round on the bee equivalent of street corners waiting for a young queen to come by.

The Queen’s job is to simply lay eggs that will produce the hive's next generation of bees. There is usually only a single queen in a hive. When the queen bee dies, either slowly or accidentally, the entire bee colony works to gain back its steady organization.  The queen bee releases chemical signals that stop other female worker bees’ ovaries from functioning.  Soon after she dies, the chemical function wears off and worker bees can lay eggs.  Then worker bees come together and create a new queen.  According several different sources, the queen bee is busiest in the summer months when she can lay 2,000 to 3,000 eggs a day.

As gardeners, we can do our part to help keep these important pollinators well fed.  Growing a diverse variety of flowering plants can satisfy the appetites of various bee species.  If we did not have them, the ecosystems would erode and we would lose reliable sources of many critical foodstuffs and our flower gardens would not flourish.  So, you might think of what you can do to invite them into your garden.  Bees are looking for two things when they visit plants:  they want nectar, the main source of energy, and they need pollen which provides a balanced diet of proteins and fats.

When planning your garden, consider having some flowers that are what bees need.  Some of the flowers planted today have been hybridized and do not have the nectar and pollen that some of the old stand-by plants have.  Some of these newer plants are completely sterile and useless to bees and other pollinators.  Providing a range of plants that will offer a succession of flowers, meaning pollen and nectar, through the entire growing season is a good start.

Native plants are usually the best for bees, butterflies and other pollinators.  Mixing these in with other plants that you love that might be showier will help attract the pollinators to your garden.

Having plants that come along all summer is most important for all bees which means planting flowering shrubs, trees, vegetables, herbs and flowers that will offer a consistent supply of pollen and nectar.  Where I live, Popular Trees are one of the first flowering trees to feed the bees in the spring.  These trees provide the nectar that they need to replenish their hives after diminishing it all winter to stay alive.  Other plants that are attractive to bees and produce high quality honey are the flowers of blackberries, fruit and citrus trees, herbs (like rosemary, borage and sage), flowering bushes, clover, other wild flowers, lavender and sourwood trees.  And if you are looking for flowers for your garden that add beauty to your flower bed and are ones that bees like, you should consider Bee Balm (Monarda), wild indigo (baptisia), purple coneflower (echinacea), Black-eyed Susan (rudbeckia), Joe-Pye weed (Eutrochium), Blazing star (Liatris), Goldenrod (solidago).

Gardening is a wonderful hobby and encouraging pollinators to come into your garden helps sustain our ecosystems and their work as a crop pollinator.  The work they do to benefit our lives is essential.  The next time you eat an apple or orange, or see a pretty patch of native flowers, remember that bees helped make this possible. Betty Montgomery is a master gardener and author of “Hydrangeas: How To Grow, Cultivate & Enjoy,” and “A Four-Season Southern Garden.” She can be reached at bmontgomery40@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: Are honeybees dying off?  It depends on who you ask.