Strolling around the perennial garden, coffee cup in one hand, just-picked raspberries in the other, I am surrounded by bumblebees foraging among flowering stems of catmint, lavender, allium and gay-feather. It is still very early, the sun just rising above the tree line, too cool for honeybees.

Even in the heat of midday in our garden, native bumblebees outnumber honeybees. This is a satisfying statistic indicating some success in creating a garden that connects with surrounding natural areas. The first visitors to our recent planting of northern bush honeysuckles (Diervilla lonicera) were bumblebees. They immediately began foraging for the nectar within the small yellow flowers of these native shrubs.

Honeybees are European insects that were first introduced to this continent more than 375 years ago at Jamestown, Va. Unlike European honeybees, extremely efficient foragers that horde pollen and nectar, native bumblebees live hand-to-mouth, acquiring just enough nectar and pollen to sustain the colony’s growth. If kept at home for too many rainy days, a bumblebee colony can starve.

In their book, “The Forgotten Pollinators,” scientists Stephen Buchmann and Gary Nabhan discuss the effects of honeybee competition on populations of native bumblebees, describing how a single strong hive of honeybees can usurp all of the available floral resources in an area and thus eliminate the wild pollinators. Honeybees are masters at finding and then translating the direction and distance of the most abundant floral resources, leaving the less productive regions to the native pollinators. A field of blueberries attracts honeybees, leaving the garden’s patch of lavender or the small planting of Diervilla for the bumblebees.

While one in every three mouthfuls of food we eat depends on pollination, a task currently relegated mainly to the exotic honeybee, populations of honeybees have started to decline in the past decade, due primarily to the spread of parasitic mites, disease and the more aggressive Africanized bees. Soon we will need the native pollinators to pick up the slack, yet the past dominance of exotic honeybees over native pollinators has had a disruptive effect on native pollinator populations, putting future agricultural pollination at risk.

Knowing this, it is extremely gratifying to see so many bumblebees foraging in our garden. If our gardens can provide small quantities of different native plant species that bloom at different times during the year, they may function in sustaining local populations of native pollinators, including bumblebees.

In addition to growing plant species that attract native pollinators, gardeners can also provide suitable pollinator nesting sites within and around the garden. For example, bumblebee queens searching for nesting sites will be attracted to clay pots left upside down in the garden. Other species of pollinating bees will be attracted to an artificial nesting site made of ordinary drinking straws. The straws are packed into an open-top milk carton, secured with glue, and the carton attached horizontally to a branch within the shady canopy of a tree. A wide variety of native bees and wasps can be attracted to the garden by drilling different-sized holes into boards made of softwoods such as pine. These boards are then placed in shady protected areas around the garden.

Creating landscapes that function as bridges between fragmented natural areas can be a hard sell, an abstract concept that is difficult to grasp and even more difficult to translate to others. For me, there is no more tangible evidence of success in creating an ecologically friendly garden than to watch bumblebees foraging in our garden.

Nectar sources for attracting native pollinators

By no means a complete list, here are a few suggested plants species, both woody and herbaceous, for attracting native pollinators, gleaned from my own observations:

Trees and shrubs

Amelanchier canadensis (Shadblow Serviceberry)

Amelanchier laevis (Alleghany Serviceberry

Cephalanthus occidentalis (Buttonbush)

Clethra alnifolia (Summersweet Clethra)

Cornus alternifolia (Pagoda Dogwood)

Myrica pensylvanica (Northern Bayberry)

Rhus typhina (Staghorn Sumac)

Spiraea alba var. latifolia (Meadowsweet)

Vaccinium angustifolium (Lowbush Blueberry)

Herbaceous perennials

Allium sp. (Onions)

Echinacea purpurea (Purple Coneflower)

Lavandula angustifolia (Lavender)

Liatris spicata (Gay-Feather)

Nepeta sp. (Catmint)

Solidago sp. (Goldenrods)