– repost and updated from Town & Country Gardening 2011 –
Repeat after me, Bees are my Friends and I will not Kill My Friends!
Without our friendly honey bees many berry, fruit and vegetable crops can not be properly pollinated to produce fruit.
Would you be surprised to find out that their are about 3500 different species of bees found in North America.
However in the USA the two main garden bees are the common European Honey Bee and the Bumble Bee. In much of the Southern and Southwestern U.S. you may also encounter the Africanized Honey Bee, AKA {Killer Bee}.
News media myth, Africanized Honey Bees are blood thirsty killers! Scientific Fact when foraging for food and pollinating your berry, fruit and vegetable crops, Africanized Honey Bees are no more aggressive than the common European Honey Bee. Africanized Honey Bees only become aggressive when defending their hive [nesting site]. As indicated by the attached map, Africanized Honey Bees are restricted to a few of our Southern and Southwestern states.
Click map to Zoom In
Africanized Honey Bee Reports
Grandma said ‘Leave them alone and they will leave you alone’. When in the garden you can limit your close encounters with bees, Don’t look or smell like a flower to a bee. Don’t wear brightly colored clothing or perfume’s of any kind.
European Honey Bee
Africanized Honey Bee
European Honey Bee and Africanized Honey Bee look almost identical. Even expert bee keepers have difficulty telling them apart by visual identification alone. Most of the time DNA testing is the only sure was to identify Africanized Honey Bee.
Warning signs that you ‘may’ have a swarm of Africanized Honey Bees. Hives or swarms of bees in places they should not be or places they are not normally found.
Africanized Honey Bees can be very aggressive and will defend an area as large as 100+ feet from their hive. If you encounter a hive {swarm} of bees, keep your distance, Do not attempt to remove them yourself. Call a bee keeper {look in your phone book yellow pages} or call your local police department to report this hive {swarm} and request that it be removed.
Bumble Bee
If you see a black and yellow bee covered from head to foot with what looks like hair, be assured it’s one of the 200 or so different species of bumble bees found in North American gardens. Bumble bees are generally non-aggressive and they seldom sting anyone. They will sting only when they feel threaten.
Bumblebees are employed in greenhouses to pollinate agricultural crops. Though they are less numerous, their high frequency buzz gives them an advantage, as the sound waves free more pollen than a honeybee’s buzz allowing better pollination of many open pollinated crops like tomato’s.
Repeat after me, Bees are my Friends and I will not Kill My Friends!
Texas A&M University Bee Information
Alternative Pollinators: Native Bees
Not from the USA Please leave me comment about your home town and country.
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Why is common sense so uncommon?
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Town & Country Gardening 
I want a bee box!!! I guess I have the next best thing…Wisteria! The bees love my wisteria. I will have to blog about that next week. This weekend my flowers should pop and the swarm should be going on. Time to get the camera out.
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Re ohineedwax- I assume that when you say bee house you mean bee hive. Hives are a lot of work. They must be kept clean, old comb and honey removed so the bees have storage space for new honey and for egg laying space. They must be fed during warm periods in the winter as well.
Happy bee watching
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Yes beehive. Well I guess I will just stick with my vegetable garden, flowers and wisteria tree to provide food for them. Just got my husband talked into chickens. I don’t think he would ever go for the beehive. lol Watch my blog next Monday for the pictures I hope to get of all the bees on the wisteria.
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Some vegetables, like squash, require a half dozen visits from bees before their flowers are fertilized. Interplanting cosmos and other bee-friendly flowers is a help. Nothing will cure having no bees. We must heal the bees we have. Thanks for alerting everybody to the necessity of the small bee. – The Healing Garden gardener
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Re garden98110 Thanks for taking time to visit my humble little blog and for your Comment(s).
Some so called experts say “squash, cucumbers and tomato’s are open pollinated and pollination from bees is not necessary. The truth is if you want productive vines bees are very necessary..
Happy gardening
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Here in the Healing Garden your little blog and humble views are considered worthwhile to us. The smaller and humbler we are ourselves the more we appreciate. Time is helpful. And gardening, too. And good examples like yours. We see fewer bees and butterflies every year. This is a matter of some healing concern. – The Healing Garden gardener
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I have been trying to convince my wife that keeping a few hives of honey bees would be great for our garden and even better for the honey. I will convince her one of these days. 🙂
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Re yourperfectburn – Grin …. Bee keeping is a great tasting hobby as well as beeing good for your fruit and vegetable gardens.
Good luck on you bee keeping project
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We live on the edge of a small town and an older neighbor used to keep bees in his yard. We had the best gardens, and never any problems. He isn’t able to keep bees anymore and it has hurt us. I wish we could attract some bee keepers to the area, I may have to work on that for this summer. Thanks for the information, and my older family members, too, always said leave them alone and they won’t hurt you. So true, I am working on passing that to my grandson.
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Re lucindalines Thanks for visiting my little blog.
Much of our declining bee population is self-inflicted. With the invention and bad press about natural sweeteners like honey, city ordinances prohibiting bee hives in cities, Our pollinator bee populations have been on a long time decline.
Many berries, fruit trees and vegetables are 100 percent dependent on bees for proper pollination.
Bee friendly summer gardening
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Bees are my Friends and I will not Kill My Friends!
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Re thefolia Thanks for your pledge of protecting our friendly, much needed pollinating bees. .
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congratulations on this post, hopefully it will combat any hysteria – love granny’s comment if you leave it alone it will leave you alone. I was looking for dragonfly information online last year and found a site which claimed: dragonflies will sting you, therefore if you have them in your pond find the larvae and cut in half with garden shears – no mention of the control they exert on mosquito populations, no mention that some of them are endangered, no matter that a dragonfly hardly ever comes in contact with a human, unless like me you keep the larva on the balcony for a week to see how they grow, and totally disregarding the fact that dragonflies in fact don’t have a sting…….beautiful insects hounded for no reason. So good on you for speaking out on behalf of the bees!
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Re polianthus – Thanks for visiting my tiny blog and for your kind comment(s).
That’s the truth, just because you saw it on the internet, does not make it a true fact.
Anyone can post anything and some of that will be miss-information.
Happy gardening
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