Photo by Heather Holm, Bombus citrinus female on Eutrochium purpureum
With earlier springs and warmer fall days, pollinators need plants that provide resources at the farthest fringes of the growing season.
It’s long been a primary tenet of gardening for pollinators to ensure you provide plants that bloom throughout the entire growing season. Not only is this just good gardening, ensuring your landscape is colorful from spring through fall, as the two examples that follow illustrate, it’s more essential than ever to ensure your garden is prepared for pollinators not just during the peak of summer, but during the earliest days of spring and the last days of fall. Check out the full post from Xerces Society
In Connecticut a major source of nectar and pollen for early pollinators are the blueberries and their close cousins, huckleberries and deer berries. They all bloom early, in late April and May. The low-growing species form extensive patches in sandy oak-pine forests, on the summits of rocky ridges, and also along rights-of-way. The flowers are bell-shaped and exquisite, if rather small, and will mature into delicious fruit relished by hikers as well as birds. A few years ago in early may, hiking along a trap rock ridge in Berlin, a continuous loud buzz of bees drowned out the bird song. Blueberry flowers were especially abundant that year because the death of hemlocks killed by wooly adelgid had opened up…