New For You

Pollinator Friendly Gardening. Gardening For Bees, Butterflies, And Other Pollinators. Rhonda Fleming Hayes. Published by Voyageur Press. 8” x 10”, soft cover, color throughout, 176 pages. ISBN 978-0-7603-4913-7. $21.99.

What an outstanding book. The author is a Master Gardener, and for the past 15 years has been applying those skills to enhance and create a whole series of pollinator friendly gardening ideas. She starts with pollinator biology and behavior, discusses natives and invasives (there’s a place for everything, but there are alternatives for invasives that she suggests), and the general habitats for most every kind of pollinator. This isn’t just flowers, it’s a lifestyle. I like that.

I’ll tell you what else I like. She isn’t the expert on everything here. She brings in other experts that really know about the plants and insects and the rest. What she does is interview these good folks. Marla Spivak is one of these, as is horticulturist George Coombs, C. Colston Burrell, Monarch experts Karen Oberhauser, Chip Taylor and Benjamin Vogt, and humming bird expert Donald Mitchell. She has all the bases covered.

But there’s more. Host plants for butterfly larvae, nesting sites for bees, and water. Who provides water for pollinators? She does, several different ways. Even some beekeepers fall down there. Pesticides, too are warned about, along with helping out beneficials in the garden. And plant lists. So many plant lists. And more plant lists. This is the place for gardening for pollinator plant lists.

A good gardener, what to plant, a friend of pollinators and a host of experts. This is one good book.

Nuc

EZ Nuc now has available a conversion kit for use in converting their standard EZ Nuc deep nuc to a medium size nuc.

Beekeepers who use all medium sized hive bodies now have a way to produce nucs for the medium size hive bodies. The tendency in the last couple of years for more mature beekeepers and the entry of women into beekeeping to use medium hive bodies resulted in EZ Nuc adding this conversion kit to their product.

The E-Z Nuc medium Frame Conversion unit. It is made of the same type of material that the E-Z nuc is made of and will raise the bottom of the deep nuc to match a medium depth.

It is available immediately from Jester Bee at www.jesterbee.com or from Dadant at www.dadant.com.