In my Portland neighborhood, during the last massive Honeybee die-off, I saw no Honeybees for 10-15 years.  None.

Most of the wild Honeybees seemed to have died.

My trees generally produced decent crops of apples and pears anyway.

Mason bees, flies, and other hobo-like critters, must have been carrying the load.

I was very pleased when I started seeing honeybees again 7-8 years ago.  I was concerned that their absence might continue forever.

Howdy,

Before any Europeans set foot in North America, there were native plants here that relied upon pollination.  Amazingly, apparently against all odds, those plants got pollinated and produced seeds, just as they had for countless millennia.  The introduction of European honeybees was not some miracle of sudden pollination.  Our native bees were doing just fine while they were doin' their jobs.  Sadly, the vast majority of Americans seem to think that European honeybees are the only little critters that can pollinate our plants.  Corporate propaganda for commercial crops. [God bless an educational system that produces such ignoramuses.]

I love my native bees and bumblebees (--which are still "bees").  They are not just taken for granted, but they are under constant assault by toxins introduced into the environment.  Before there were "bees" (i.e., European honeybees), the "New World" was doing just fine.  Here we have a wonderful diversity of native bee species which -- just like the European honeybees -- are croaking because the manufacturers and purveyors of pesticides for the production of corporate crops have the money and influence to buy spineless politicians.  Oh dear!  I mustn't go on.  As my wife says, "Don't get him started!"

Suffice to say that we have been taking our native bees (--and indeed our native biodiversity) for granted.  They're only a tiny part of our unraveling environment.  For those of you who love our native bees and would like to know more about them, and perhaps even try to encourage them, I very highly recommend the book by Joseph S. Wilson and Olivia M. Carril:  "The Bees in Your Backyard, A Guide to North American Bees."  It's the first of its kind and an outstanding reference.  I only wish that there were a comparable publication on our native wasps.  

Please don't hurt me.  I'm only expressing my opinion.

Tim

I bet that book did not include what I think is a special observation that I heard from an elder native man from the city of North Pole Alaska who, after an orchard advisory meeting, would tell me true bee storys. 

The true story about some Alaska bumblebees is that they are being observed as truly capable of pollination of bog blueberry and lingion berry at 35F!! I know some of the tiny bumblebees he was talking about because I have seen them around in the gardens that I don't have these berries, so seeing them in my later crops is believing. As yet I don't have blues. Furthermore the bog blue and lingion berry are very early often not flowering due to winters extremes at times, and other years crops fail due to flower freezing. So in bloom these arctic bumblebees are a must.

So like you said (and Stamets),
...we better start paying more attention.

Thanks for the nice comment, John.  I try to self-censor, but at times it can be really hard to keep me in check.  I just noticed an article while trying to keep up on the news and thought it was timely and would fit here in this forum:

<https://www.theguardian.com/en.....re&gt;

For those who try to stay abreast of actual happenings, the real news always seems to be a downer.  Ignoring it, though, sure doesn't make it better.  (I consider myself a realist, but when my wife asks me if the glass is "half-full or half-empty," I always tell her that it's "half-empty and full of floaters."    Ya gotta keep a sense of humor to stay above it all, and then try to do what you can locally and politically.

Tim

I had meant to cite it earlier, but Rooney mentioned the ever-indefatigable bumble bees and I thought I should mention the book "Bumble Bees of North America: an Identification Guide," by Paul Williams, et al.  As with the North American Bees book, cited above, in order to truly definitively identify what critter you have before you it is very helpful to have a good magnification source, an astute critical eye, and a knowledge of the basic vocabulary related to insect anatomy.  

Even if you can't confidently identify a bumble bee to the species level, you should still be able to see the subtle differences in their sizes, coloration patterns, perhaps behaviors, and habitats.  Just among bumblebees, there are short-tongued ones and long-tongued ones (--and intermediate-length as well).  These will tend to feed on different flowers in the landscape.  Some will tend to nest in grassy areas; others in wooded areas.

Providing a diversity of soils and plants will promote insect diversity.

My wife and I are still amazed when we think back to our first home in southern California.  It had been in a citrus grove in the 1940's, then developed into homes in the 1950's.  We bought it in 1988 from an elderly woman who had stopped watering her yard several years earlier.  One of my first projects was to plant-out my cactus collection along the length of the asphalted driveway.  Then, the area between the house and the garage, which was basically alluvial sandy soil, and the "cat-box" for at least 24 neighborhood cats, was hand-excavated to make an 1100-gallon pond so that I could grow many of the aquatic, semi-aquatic, and riparian plants that I wanted to grow.  Then, little by little, the back area was planted with semi-dwarf fruit trees and other fruiting plants, and the front yard....  Oh, the front yard was a blank canvas that I gradually filled with native Californian plants that the soil hadn't seen in decades.  When I'd go out botanizing, I'd collect seeds of various natives that I wanted to grow and learn more about, whether annual or perennial....

...I just got out my notebook of "Seed germination records" to see what I had planted in the front yard during that era and I don't even want to try to count.  I planted scores and scores of native annuals and herbaceous perennials that I had collected while engaged in field botany.

Suffice to say that what followed was an annual increase in insect species diversity that my wife and I still remember with awe.  Just that little 1/7th of an acre in the midst of a 1950's suburb made it absolutely clear how vitally important a diverse plant habitat is to the subsequent diversity of insects.

What has changed in recent decades is that biocides have become so prevalent in our environment that countless beneficial insects don't even stand a chance at survival.  In many cases, just the break-down products of herbicides and insecticides are as toxic as the original chemical that was applied.  How long ago was DDT banned?  And yet its residues can still be found in the environment.  I even met a guy who lamented the fact that DDT had been banned and was glad that he still had a supply of it.

Anyway,...  As usual I've gone off on a tangent.  I had hoped to get back to davem's original posting:  

     What native pollinator plants/habitats do you have in your orchard?

I guess that maybe I sorta got near that, but didn't really get to my current environmental situation.  It'll have to wait. Clearly I've blathered enough.

Tim

GH -- Thanks for the book recommendation.  1492 definitely "turned the world upside down," and Charles Mann's book sounds like a good read!  I love the thought of European honeybees as "White man's flies."  (--Not that I have anything against European bees,... or flies for that matter.) 

Tim - I'm so glad that you're enjoying "1493", it's a fascinating book and well worth reading.  I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I had never given what the Americas were like before Europeans arrived much thought. For example I didn't realize that earthworms weren't native to all parts of North America until I was well into adulthood, and the effect that they had when they were introduced didn't hit me until I had read the book. It is eye-opening.

My memory was a little faulty -  Native Americans called European honeybees "English flies".

Watershed Alliance of SW Washington, Audubon Society of Portland, and Columbia Land Trust have teamed up to offer a "Backyard Habitat Certification Program" for Clark County, Washington. It's still ramping up, so for now there's a wait list. There is a size limit, I think that it's an acre (?), so they are focusing on more urban properties. This is exciting and will help homeowners who want to make their yards bee-friendly. The website is backyardhabitats.org. The Watershed Alliance of SW Washington contact is Bethany Wray, bethany@thewatershedalliance.org.