Quantifying variation among garden plants in attractiveness to bees and other flower‐visiting insects

By Mihail Garbuzov, Francis L. W. Ratnieks. 2014

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

1. Pollinating insects are globally declining, with one of the main causes being the loss of flowers. With the value of countryside reducing, urban areas, particularly gardens, are increasingly recognized as of benefit to wildlife, including flower-visiting insects. 2. Many gardeners specifically select plant varieties attractive to wildlife. Given the wide public interest, many lists of recommended varieties have been produced by both amateurs and professional organizations, but appear not to be well grounded in empirical data. These lists, however, are not without merit and are an obvious starting point. There is clearly a need to put the process onto a firmer footing based more on data and less on opinion and general experience. 3. We collected data over two summers by counting flower-visiting insects as they foraged on 32 popular summer-flowering garden plant varieties in a specially planted experimental garden, with two smaller additional gardens set up in year two to check the generality of the results. With many thousands of plant varieties available to gardeners in the United Kingdom, and other countries or regions, it would have been an impossible task to make a comprehensive survey resulting in a complete and authoritative list. 4. Our results are valuable and encouraging. Garden flowers attractive to the human eye vary enormously, approximately 100-fold, in their attractiveness to insects. Insects, especially bees and hover flies, can be attracted in large numbers with clear differences in the distribution of types attracted by different varieties. 5. Our results clearly show that there is a great scope for making gardens and parks more bee- and insect-friendly by plant selection. Horticulturally modified plant varieties created by plant breeding, including hybrids, are not necessarily less attractive to insects and in some cases are more attractive than their wild-type counterparts. Importantly, all the plants we compared were considered highly attractive to humans, given that they are widely sold as ornamental garden plants. 6. Helping insect pollinators in gardens does not involve extra cost or gardening effort, or loss of aesthetic attractiveness. Furthermore, the methods of quantifying insect-friendliness of plant varieties trialled in this study are relatively simple and can form the basis of further research, including ‘citizen science’.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f05b79cbc52309a9786a7997479d468ef83792a4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. E. Rotheray
2. E. Nicholls
3. C. Botías
4. R. Winfree
5. Tina Harrison
6. Dave Goulson
7. C. Kremen
8. N. Williams

In Genetics

1. E. Rotheray
2. E. Nicholls
3. C. Botías
4. Tina Harrison
5. R. Winfree
6. Dave Goulson
7. N. E. Raine

In Social Psychology

1. Tina Harrison
2. R. Winfree
3. Dave Goulson

Citations in the corpus

• Landscape impacts on pollinator communities in temperate systems: evidence and knowledge gaps (2017, unknown): “Gardeners can now make evidence-based decisions on best plant species to attract pollinators (e.g. Garbuzov & Ratnieks 2014; Salisbury et al. 2015) and confirmation that creation of wildflower areas (Blackmore & Goulson 2014) and reduced mowing regimes (Garbuzov, Fensome & Ratnieks 2015) provide…”
• ECOLOGY OF ORGANISMS IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS Urban drivers of plant-pollinator interactions (2015, background): “Similarly, ornamental plantings may be consciously designed to provide long-season bloom, either through selection of assemblages with complementary bloom periods or through selection or breeding of longblooming plants (Garbuzov & Ratnieks 2014).”
• Quantifying nectar production by flowering plants in urban and rural landscapes (2021, unknown): “Although non-native plants are often regarded as less valuable to wildlife than their native counterparts, many such as Borago officinalis , Lavandula spp. and Nepeta spp., are frequently visited by UK pollinators (Baldock et al., 2019; Garbuzov & Ratnieks, 2014; Rollings & Goulson, 2019).”
• Bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers (2015, background): “Many lists of bee- or wildlifefriendly flowers are available on the Internet, but they tend to be based on anecdote rather than evidence, and there is a need to develop regionally appropriate, evidence-based advice as to the best plants to grow (152).”