Now that it’s June, and No Mow May has passed, what can you continue to do for pollinators in general and bees specifically?

Easy to hard

There are easy things, like simply mowing less frequently and letting dandelions and other flowery weeds live in your yard. There are harder things, such as setting up apiaries and becoming a keeper of the non-native honeybee with support from a local organization like the SE MN Beekeepers Association (SEMBA). And there are intermediate things, such as building your yard’s early spring through late fall nectar sources.

While non-native, honey bees are well studied. A 2019 book called “The Lives of Bees” (available through the Rochester Public Library on paper or as an audiobook) is one I’ve enjoyed recently, and in fact one of my children was listening to parts of it with me.

If you live in Rochester proper, consider applying for a stormwater garden grant (closed until October for 2023 plantings) where many of the native raingarden friendly plants are also pollinator friendly. If you need ideas, use their map or list functions to find other local gardens you can go look at. This program, currently called “Rochester Garden Grants” is the reincarnation of a project I was involved in back in 2009, as a member of the initial task force for “Realize Rain Gardens Rochester”.

A Twin Cities-centric program that’s applicable to much of Minnesota is called Blue Thumb, and it includes many online resources for pocket plantings, bee lawns, pollinator meadows, and pollinator-friendly trees and shrubs.

And while many of these ideas are more expensive to install, they require less expensive and time-consuming maintenance than a traditional mono-culture lawn, as well as requiring significantly less water.

Changes elsewhere

Los Angeles in particular, and southern California in general, made the news recently, for having new watering rules go into effect for June 2022. With these new rules, now their millions of residents are restricted to a single day of lawn watering per week. Los Angeles is apparently less restrictive, allowing 2 days of lawn watering, but those have to be outside peak evaporation hours of 9 am to 4 pm.

If you scroll half-way down the article, there are before and after pictures of a house whose lawn underwent a water-friendly, pollinator-friendly transformation. One of the most common complaints heard about transitioning from a mono-culture lawn to something with more variety is that anything other than lawn looks messy. Besides the fact that environmentally we can’t afford to continue to maintain lawns for both water and biodiversity reasons, personally I don’t think the pictures in this BBC article look messy, nor do any of the native planting photo gallery examples from Blue Thumb (2/3 of the way down the page).

What now?

There’s no point in investing financially for the future if there’s no natural world left in that future to live in. So how are you supporting our natural world in June?