Informative article in the New York Times about [url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/garden/30GARDEN.html]Bees in your Garden[/url] and how native species of plants positively impacts the local native bee population and how non-native plants don't contribute to the local bee population/ecology.
...research that Gordon Frankie, an entomologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has begun... where he and his students have surveyed 1,000 different plants, both native and nonnative.
"Only 50 were native plants, but of that 50, 80 percent were attractive to pollinators," Professor Frankie said. "In contrast, only 10 percent of the 950 nonnatives were attractive to pollinators."
...Both honeybees and natives do an excellent job of pollinating such plants when they are around, but all these pollinators are in serious decline from many stressors, and scientists suspect that habitat loss is key.
Check out the article, it's a good read.
