Natives California Plants Vs. Exotics For Attracting Bees?

The decision to plant native California plants or exotics in your garden is personal for a variety of reasons. However, if you were a native California bee or a honey bee, your decision to select a plant would be based on much more practical matters – that is, the pollen and nectar resources that are available, attractive, and suitable for the reproduction of your offspring, regardless of plant origin. This is important to keep in mind when planning for a bee-friendly garden. Plant selection should be based on bee preferences. One should also take into consideration the blooming season and flowering duration of the selected plants. The following list of 50 or so recommended bee-friendly plants is based on what the bees “tell us” about their preferences through their selection/visitation patterns on the ornamentals we have surveyed. As a group, these plants will attract a wide variety of bee species.

If you are interested in attracting only certain types of bees (large, small, shiny, native, honey bees), check out the column in our most recommended list or our more extensive complete list entitled “Native Bee Visitors” to find out what kinds of native bees each plant attracts. You can also use our Bee-Friendly Garden Builder Tool to find just the right type of bee-attracting plant for your garden. If honey bees are desired in your yard, for example, there are several plants known to attract them in high numbers, such as Lavandula spp., Rosmarinus officinalis, Aptenia cordifolia ‘Red Apple,’ Borago officinalis, and Origanum spp. (Oregano). If your plan calls for large native bees, then attention should be focused on plants of the families Asteraceae, Hydrophyllaceae, and Lamiaceae, which have a high percentage of attractive plant species for these bees. Examples include Coreopsis spp., Cosmos spp., Helianthus annuus in the Asteraceae family, Phacelia spp. in the Hydrophyllaceae family, and Agastache spp. and Salvia spp. in the Lamiaceae family.

The column entitled “Attraction” will let you know the plant’s relative attractiveness, or the average numbers of honey bees versus native bees you can expect to find visiting the plant. Our list of recommended plants contains only plants that were commonly visited by native and/or honey bees (in the Attraction column, they will be marked with a “C” for common, which means they were visited on average by 5 or more bees per 3 minutes – for details, check out the section on Frequency Counts). We have also provided a more extensive list which includes plants that attracted bees at occasional (1-5 bees per 3 minutes) and rare (0-1 bees per 3 minutes) levels.