While our gardens sleep for the few winter months we have, what happens to the bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects that we depend upon during the growing season?
Where do they go? How do they survive the winter? Are there things we can do to provide nesting and overwintering habitat?
A ground nest entrance in a patchy lawn.
While it may seem like the insects have vanished for the year, the vast majority of them haven’t actually gone anywhere. They see your garden as a place of protection from the elements and will display a variety of unique strategies to survive the cool winter climate.
Allow fallen leaves to collect in beds and under trees. Photo by Elizabeth Georges.
Most bees and solitary wasps nest beneath the soil in patchy, bare areas of lawn, while others build cavity nests in places like the hollow stems of plants, old beetle burrows, tree snags, or decaying logs. Bumble bee nests are often found in loose undisturbed soil beneath woody plants, tall grasses, or other dense vegetation. Luna moths overwinter in cocoons, snug in an insulated pile of leaves, while hawkmoths burrow and pupate underground. Eastern black swallowtails camouflage their chrysalids as a dried leaf or a broken twig anchored from a dead flower stem. Other insects such as fireflies, spiders, and beetles seek shelter in leaf litter and rock piles or brush. These are just a few examples of the many insects that will take up shelter in the natural features of your yard.
Having a diversity of native plants is a good place to start when adding overwintering elements to your yard. Consider adding shrubs with hollow stems, such as elderberry, pokeweed, oakleaf hydrangea, and leucothoe; and wildflowers such as dotted horsemint, Joe-pye weed, purple coneflower, ironweed, and asters. All of these plants will provide food for wildlife and nesting sites for a variety of stem-nesting bees.
Leave stumps, snags, and fallen logs for cavity nesters. You can build brush piles with twigs and branches. Photo by Elizabeth Georges.
You can start to cut back spent flower stalks in the spring, but don’t cut them to the ground. Leave a variety of heights, eight to 24 inches above the ground. Female bees will use the cut ends to start a nest. The bee larvae will grow through the season, hibernate over the winter, and then emerge the following spring. It’s a yearlong process so the stalks must stay in the garden, otherwise, you are throwing away your next generation of pollinators. If you must cut back your plant material, keep it in the landscape instead of getting rid of it. Bundle it up or create a brush pile in an area out of the way. Insects will still use the plant if it’s cut and moved. The old stalks will eventually decompose after the insects are through with them, adding nutrients back into the soil.
We’ve been trained to think that a tidy expanse of lawn is the goal, but that lawn doesn’t do much for the birds, bees, butterflies, and other creatures that we share our yards with.Retaining and incorporating as many natural features as possible into your landscape, rather than tidying them away, will help increase the availability and quality of nesting and overwintering habitat. Habitats that connect can have a big impact on a neighborhood scale. One small habitat becomes a large habitat that a diversity of beneficial insects and wildlife can use. Consider putting the pruners up, leaving the leaves, and letting the insects do the work for the future success of their generations and your garden alike.