During the spring and summer there is always a lot of buzz around pollinators, their habitats, and how to support them. But did you know you can continue to support your backyard friends in the fall and winter as well? Through a few simple steps you can continue to provide for your local pollinators as the weather turns cold. By offering them housing during the snowy winter months you can guarantee they’ll return to your gardens the following year. It’s a win for everyone!
Our pollinating insects in southern Michigan are solitary bees, butterflies, moths, and flies. Many of the bees and flies prefer to either hibernate underground or in hollowed out stems. Butterflies, moths, and a few bee species prefer to overwinter in leaf piles. Other bugs, such as lightning bugs and beneficial garden spiders, prefer compressed stacks of sticks and logs. Many frogs and toads prefer leaves and stick piles as well, using the protective pocket of decomposing foliage to keep the soil above them warmer as they burrow into the earth to hibernate.
How can you achieve these overwinter habitats? The simplest way is to “do less” in the fall. Most of our fall yard clean-up is detrimental to our garden buddies. Activities like pulling up annual flowers, cutting back stalks, pre-winter rototilling, and excessive leaf clean up leave your yard a pollinator wasteland. Letting your flower stalks and seed pods stand offers winter habitat for the critters that prefer to overwinter in stems, as well as food for non-migratory birds. This method also adds winter intrigue in your garden. A bright red cardinal picking at the tall, top-tufted coneflower stems glittering in ice bring a quiet beauty to winter gardens.
You should avoid tilling your garden beds at the end of the season for multiple reasons. First, a large portion of our pollinators burrow just six inches into the soil, nearest to where they found food that year. When you till, you could accidentally unearth your little friends, and in most cases kill them. Another reason to avoid autumn tilling is to protect your topsoil. When you turn the soil before the harsh winter months, you expose the microbes that make the soil healthy to the wind and cold, thus making your soil less nutritious, and in return making your garden less successful. Fall tilling is a lose-lose, for sure. Instead of removing pollinators and soil health, add even more habitat and nutrition to your gardens with leaves! Adding two to three inches of leaves to your beds offers habitat to even more of your insect buddies as well as adding more nutrition to your soil through natural leaf decomposition.
Another more involved, and honestly more fun, way to help your pollinators is to create a Pollinator Habitat, otherwise called a Bee House. In addition to the suggestions above, I add these houses to all my various garden beds in the fall to encourage pollinators to stay close and help me out next year. The easiest way to make one is to gather pinecones, bark, small twigs, leaves and straw, and stack them inside a small wooden box. Then I use a few staples and secure ¼ inch hardware mesh to the opening so the materials can’t fall out or get pulled out by a critter for nesting materials or a winter smorgasbord. Take care to orient the opening to face southeast, to catch the morning sun, but avoid deep shade, when possible, to deter predatory wasps. Then, when the overnight temperatures consistently dip below 35 degrees, I move the boxes into our unheated garage to provide protection though the cold months. You want their storage temperature to stay between 35 degrees to 39 degrees. When spring returns, and the overnight temperature is consistently above 35 degrees (in our area that can be anywhere from late February to early May!), I put the boxes back out in the gardens in the same orientation as they were before I stored them (facing southeast). Once I see my pollinator friends out and about in the yard, I remove the staples, empty the box’s contents, and store the houses until the following fall.
My bee houses are crude, but they’re super effective and more than get the job done. But if you want to make a prettier version, the sky is the limit! There are a few guidelines to help make sure there’s no vacancy in your hotel over the winter. First, don’t make your bee house too big. A huge structure might sound fun, and be neat to look at, but remember that you will need to fill it with materials, move it in and out of storage, and then turn those materials over once a year. Only bite off as much as you want to chew! Second, choose a space to locate your box so that it is protected from wind, rain, and other critters. Keep in mind that insects are food for a lot of other animals. It would be a shame to have your little habitat turn into a bird buffet, or see it cleaned out by a critter for nesting supplies, just before wintertime. Lastly, if you decide you want to paint your hotel, avoid toxic paint, and only paint the outside.
Finally, different pollinators have a variety of overwintering needs. Be sure to provide different nesting options to suit their requirements. As mentioned above, pinecones, bark, sticks, leaves, and straw are my “go-to” options, but that is because they’re all readily available to me. If you need to procure materials, here are some helpful guidelines.
Hole-nesting bees need small openings to make their hibernations successful. These are the bees that normally use stems to overwinter in. Cattail reeds, coneflower stems, and lake reeds such as horsetail ferns, are the best options found in nature. If you decide to purchase straws, be sure they are made of cardboard and avoid bamboo and plastic straws, as they retain moisture, which causes problems during development. The straw’s openings should range somewhere between 4 mm and 10 mm in size and be at least 6 inches long. This will ensure that the bees have the space they need to grow and develop. If you are struggling to procure this type of material, you can always drill a succession of holes into a block of wood or a log, varying the sizes from 4 mm up to 10 mm. Just remember to drill them as deep as possible.
My final suggestion is to make leaf mould. This is a great way to overwinter a lot of pollinators, as well as use some of nature’s abundance to your advantage. To make leaf mould, choose a small, shady spot in your yard that has good ventilation. Lay a piece of clean, non-inked cardboard down to suppress weed growth and simply load it up as tall as you can with leaves in the fall and let it sit until next autumn. But a word of warning, not all leaves are good for certain plants. Avoid using black walnut leaves if you plan to use the mould in gardens where you grow vegetables. Black walnut leaves contain juglone, and it will kill your solanaceae (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, potatoes, etc.) Oak and beech will break down the fastest, while conifer needles will take the longest. I have a lot of maple leaves, and they break down in about a year. You’ll know when your mould is ready when it slightly resembles soil consistency. Once it’s finished you can add it to your gardens at any time. I suggest adding it to your gardens in the fall, then put an additional two inches of that season’s fallen leaves on top, and voilà! You have a lovely little ecosystem that will feed your perennial plants through the winter.
For more information on protecting and attracting pollinators you can visit these online resources:
Almanac.com/more-ways-use-fall-leaves-garden
Almanac.com/bee-houses-native-solitary-bees
Almanac.com/native-bees0best-pollinatos-your-garden
Almanac.com/building-pollinator-garden
Almanac.com/10-fall-cleanup-tips-better-spring-garden
Karen Quinn is a writer and artist who homesteads on a rural urban farm in Livonia, Michigan with her husband, son, and menagerie of animals. Her favorite things are reading, exploring, and drinking tea.
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During the spring and summer there is always a lot of buzz around pollinators, their habitats, and how to support them. But did you know you can continue to support your backyard friends in the fall and winter as well? Through a few simple steps you can continue to provide for your local pollinators as the weather turns cold. By offering them housing during the snowy winter months you can guarantee they’ll return to your gardens the following year. It’s a win for everyone!