Maximize Pollination

To get maximum yield from a food forest, or garden, we need good pollination. Many pollinators exist regionally, as well as the plants that attract them. What works here in WA will probably not work in TX, or VT.

The Pollinator Partnership has taken a lot of the mystery out of this. They are using a sub-system division of the US into hundreds of unique regions. Each state is divided into multiple ecological zones. For each region, they list the pollinators, and their attractants/food sources. If you go to their website and plug in your ZIP code, it will display a 24 page PDF booklet specific to your region.

Their site is here:

http://www.pollinator.org/guides.htm

Hope this helps you "bee happy".

Great link, thank you!

Welcome to Permies, Adam.

Thanks for the link, John.

it's cool that government organizations are partly funding this project. thanks for the link!

To help make those guides even more useful, here is a link to http://www.plantnative.org/
On that page, you can click on your state (or region for states with multiple regions).
You can either get lists of native plants, or local nurseries that supply them.
Great resource if you are trying to find native plants for your area.

I saw these booklets while attending a pollinator conference in DC a few years back. They are beautifully produced, but very general. When you flip between the various booklets you begin to see common "cut/paste" segments.

The information of what bee lives in what state is out there. Somewhere. I'm going to be reaching out to the state extension services in the next year to find specific lists of which bee is in which state... and will look to provide information on how best to raise the more common and "useful" bees. Useful, meaning that the bee is easy to manage and has specific purposeful pollination capabilities for human planted crops.

There are various science generated sites that are a bit tricky to understand. Here's a great site as an example... http://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20q?search=Apoidea

Thanks for the links to the GREAT resources. I was able to locate a local native plant resource that we will be sure to visit soon.