How to Attract Pollinators

Updated August 2026 · Garden Advice Guide

Pollinators need three things from a garden: flowers blooming continuously from early spring to hard frost, shallow water they can land on without drowning, and undisturbed places to nest. Most gardens deliver the first one for about six weeks in June and neglect the other two entirely, which is why a yard full of flowers can still be quiet. Fix the gaps in your bloom calendar, put out a water dish with stones in it, and leave a patch of bare soil and some standing stems, and the insects arrive on their own.

The plants are the easy part. The water and the nesting habitat are where you'll get the biggest return for the least work.

Planning the season's bloom? Map your planting dates with our free Planting Calendar so nothing goes in too late to flower.

A note on numbers. This page gives you bloom windows, plant counts, spacings and square footage, not dollar figures. Nursery stock, bulbs and seed are priced by your region, your supplier and the season, and we do not set any of it. Work out what you need here, then price the list at two or three local suppliers.

How to Attract Pollinators All Season: The Bloom Gap

Walk through a typical yard in early April and again in late September and you'll find almost nothing in flower. That's the problem in one observation.

Native bees emerge on a schedule tied to temperature, and the earliest species are flying in March in much of the country, weeks before most garden perennials wake up. Bumblebee queens emerge from hibernation in early spring, alone, needing nectar immediately to found a colony. Get that wrong and the colony never starts. At the other end, mated bumblebee queens and migrating monarchs need heavy nectar in September and October to survive winter or complete a migration.

A garden that peaks in June and empties in September supports the easy part of the season and fails the hard parts.

Bloom succession table

Aim for at least three plants in flower at any moment, across the whole span.

Two plants do more work than anything else on that table: goldenrod and aster. They're the backbone of the late-season nectar supply across most of North America, and the reason so many pollinators struggle in fall is that gardeners cut them out as weeds. Goldenrod does not cause hay fever, incidentally. That's ragweed, which blooms at the same time with wind-borne pollen. Goldenrod pollen is heavy and insect-carried and never reaches your nose.

Let some herbs flower. Oregano, thyme, chives, basil, cilantro, and dill in bloom are among the busiest plants in any garden, and dill and fennel flowers are the specific magnet for parasitic wasps that control garden caterpillars. Sacrificing one plant of each to flowering costs you nothing you'll miss. Our guide to how to grow herbs covers keeping enough for the kitchen while letting the rest bolt.

Native Plants Versus Ornamentals

Both feed pollinators. They don't feed the same ones, and the difference is larger than most garden writing admits.

Generalist pollinators, honeybees and common bumblebees, will visit almost anything with accessible nectar, native or not. That's why a bed of lavender and catmint looks busy.

Specialists are the issue. Roughly a quarter to a third of native bee species in North America are pollen specialists, meaning they can only raise young on pollen from one plant genus or a small group of them. Squash bees need cucurbits. Chimney bees need bee balm relatives. Certain mining bees need only willow, or only spring beauty. To those species, a garden of exotic ornamentals is empty ground no matter how many blooms it holds.

The same pattern holds for butterflies and moths. Adults drink nectar from almost anything, but caterpillars eat specific host plants. Monarch caterpillars eat only milkweed. Native oaks in the eastern US support hundreds of caterpillar species, and a comparable non-native ornamental tree may support a handful. Since caterpillars are also what most songbirds feed their chicks, host plants ripple well beyond insects.

The practical version:

• Aim for roughly 70 percent native plants in a pollinator planting. That's the point at which most research suggests insect populations sustain themselves rather than merely visiting.
• Native means native to your region, not to the continent. Check your state's native plant society or your county extension list.
• Keep the ornamentals you love. Catmint, lavender, oregano, salvia, and sedum are excellent nectar plants and there's no reason to pull them.
• Avoid double-flowered cultivars. Breeding for extra petals often converts the reproductive parts into petals, leaving a flower with little or no nectar and pollen. A double coneflower or a frilly double marigold is decorative and empty. Single, open-faced flowers are what you want.
• Watch cultivar changes. Some cultivars of native plants, especially those bred for dark leaves or unusual colors, produce measurably less nectar than the straight species. When in doubt, plant the plain one.
• Include host plants, not just nectar plants. Milkweed for monarchs, dill and fennel and parsley for swallowtails, violets for fritillaries, native trees and shrubs where you have room.

Plant in Clumps, Not Singles

This is the cheapest change on this page and one of the most effective.

A single coneflower in a mixed border is a weak signal. A block of nine coneflowers is a destination.

Bees forage with flower constancy, meaning an individual bee tends to work one species at a time on a trip. That behavior is what makes pollination work, since pollen goes to the right flower. But it means a bee that finds one plant of a species and no more nearby has spent flight energy for very little return, and it's unlikely to come back.

Clumping fixes that:

• Plant in groups of at least 3, ideally 5 to 9 of the same species, in a patch roughly 3 feet across or larger.
• Bigger patches attract more species, not just more individuals. Research on pollinator plantings consistently finds patch size drives diversity.
• Repeat clumps through the bed rather than scattering singles. Three groups of five reads better to a bee, and to your eye, than fifteen plants dotted around.
• Group by bloom time too, so each season's clump is a real patch and not one plant here and one there.

If you have limited space, a single 4x8 bed planted as four species in clumps of six will do more for pollinators than the same bed planted with twenty-four different singles.

Our companion planting chart covers which flowering plants earn their space next to vegetables, and if deer browse your beds, the deer resistant flowers list overlaps heavily with good pollinator plants. Where bed space is short, a fence or an arbor can carry the nectar instead, and flowering vines by zone covers the honeysuckle, trumpet vine and passion flower that hummingbirds and long tongued bees work hardest.

Nesting Habitat: Bare Ground Beats Bee Hotels

Here's the part that gets left out. About 90 percent of native bee species are solitary, meaning every female is her own queen, builds her own nest, and provisions it alone. And roughly 70 percent of them nest in the ground.

Ground-nesting bees dig a tunnel into bare or sparsely vegetated soil, usually a few inches to a foot deep, stock each cell with a pollen loaf, lay an egg, and seal it. The nest entrance is a hole a few millimeters across with a small mound of soil around it. Most people have never noticed one.

What ground nesters need:

• Bare or thinly vegetated soil, in sun, well drained, on level ground or a slight slope. A south-facing patch is ideal.
• No mulch on that patch. Landscape fabric and 3 inches of bark chips are a sealed roof to a mining bee. Mulch everywhere else if you like, but leave openings.
• No tilling. Tilling destroys nests outright, along with a year's worth of brood.
• Undisturbed through the season. Nests are active for weeks and the brood develops underground for months.

Leaving even a few square feet of bare, sunny, undisturbed ground at the edge of a bed does more for native bee populations than almost anything you can buy. It costs nothing and looks like neglect, which is the only hard part.

Cavity nesters, the remaining 30 percent, use hollow stems, old beetle tunnels in dead wood, and similar spaces. Mason bees and leafcutter bees are the familiar ones. They want:

• Standing dead stems, especially pithy ones like raspberry, elderberry, sunflower, and joe pye weed.
• A dead branch or a small log left in place.
• Untidy corners generally.

About bee hotels

Bee hotels are popular, and they're where good intentions most often go wrong.

The decorative ones sold in garden centers are frequently poorly designed. Common problems:

• Tubes too large or too small. Most cavity-nesting bees want 4 to 8 mm interior diameter. The pine cones, wood shavings, and wide bamboo in many kits are decorative filler that nothing uses.
• Tubes too short. Under about 6 inches, mother bees skew heavily toward male eggs, which are laid nearest the entrance. A hotel producing mostly males contributes little.
• Drilled blocks that can't be cleaned. A solid block of drilled holes cannot be opened, so parasites and fungal disease accumulate season after season.
• Too many holes in one place. A hundred tubes packed together concentrates bees far beyond natural density, which is exactly how parasitic wasps, pollen mites, and chalkbrood fungus spread. A dense, dirty hotel can become a population sink, killing more bees than it produces.

If you want one anyway, do it properly: use replaceable paper liners or split blocks you can open, 4 to 8 mm holes, 6 inches deep, keep it small, mount it 3 to 5 feet up facing morning sun with a roof overhang, and clean or replace the liners every year. Move cocoons to a clean tube in fall and store them cold. That's real work, and it's the entire reason a bare soil patch is the better recommendation for most gardeners.

Water With Somewhere to Land

Bees drown easily. A deep birdbath or an open bucket is a hazard, not a water source, and a pond with steep edges gets used only where plants reach the surface.

What works:

• A shallow dish with stones or marbles that break the surface, so insects land on dry rock and drink from the edge of the water. A plant saucer works perfectly.
• A birdbath with a layer of pebbles in the bottom, filled shallow.
• A damp patch of sand or mud. Butterflies puddle on wet mineral-rich soil, and it supplies salts they can't get from nectar. A shallow tray of damp sand with a pinch of sea salt mixed in gets heavy use.
• A slow drip onto a stone. Moving water attracts more insects and won't stagnate.

Refresh it every 2 to 3 days in warm weather, which also prevents mosquito larvae from completing their cycle, since they need roughly 7 to 10 days of standing water. Rinse the dish when you refill.

Place water within about 20 feet of your main flower planting. Bees forage from a nest that may be a quarter mile away, but they'll use a nearby source far more readily than a distant one. Put it in a sunny sheltered spot at ground level or on a low stump, and keep it in the same place so it becomes a known stop.

Pesticides: The Section That Matters Most

You can plant everything above and undo all of it with one poorly timed application. This is the highest-leverage thing on the page, and the rules are short.

Never spray a plant that is in bloom. Not in the morning, not carefully, not just this once. A flowering plant is where pollinators are actively working, and residue on petals and in nectar reaches them directly. If a blooming plant has a pest problem that genuinely requires treatment, wait until bloom is finished, or remove the flowers first, or accept the damage. There is no version of spraying a blooming plant that's safe for pollinators.

Understand systemic products before you use one. Systemics are absorbed by the plant and moved through its tissues, including into pollen and nectar, where they persist for weeks to months and in woody plants sometimes for years. A soil drench applied in April can still be showing up in the flowers in July. The neonicotinoid class is the well-known example, and it's the reason a plant treated at the nursery can be hazardous long after you buy it. Ask your nursery whether their flowering plants were treated with systemics, and buy from growers who can answer.

Order of control, always, and chemicals genuinely last:

1. Cultural. Right plant for the site, good spacing for airflow, rotation, healthy soil, watering at the base, clearing infected debris. Most pest problems in a home garden trace back to a stressed plant.
2. Physical. Row cover, hand picking, a strong jet of water, barriers, traps, pruning out an infested shoot. Fast, cheap, and specific.
3. Biological. Let predators work. Ladybug and hoverfly larvae, lacewings, parasitic wasps, and ground beetles handle a lot if you let flowering herbs bloom and stop spraying broad-spectrum products. Targeted biologicals like Bt for caterpillars affect a narrow group and spare bees.
4. Chemical, last resort only. If you get here, choose the narrowest active-ingredient class that addresses your specific pest, read the label completely, and follow its rates, timing, and restrictions exactly. The label is the legal document, and applying a product to a crop it isn't labeled for, or at a different rate, is against the law regardless of intent. Many labels carry an explicit pollinator protection statement, and it is binding.

If you must treat a non-blooming plant near pollinator activity: apply in the evening after foraging stops, when temperatures are cooler and there's a full night for residues to dry and degrade before bees fly. Avoid drift onto anything in flower nearby. Do not apply on windy days. Mow flowering weeds like clover and dandelion in the lawn before any lawn treatment, or better, leave them and skip the treatment.

Broad-spectrum insecticides kill the predators too, and predator populations recover more slowly than pest populations. A spray that clears aphids in a week often produces a worse aphid outbreak in three, because the ladybugs are gone. Our guide on how to get rid of aphids works through that sequence without reaching for chemicals.

Leave the Garden Standing Over Winter

Fall cleanup is where a season's pollinator habitat gets bagged up and hauled to the curb.

Where the insects actually are in November:

• Inside hollow and pithy stems. Small carpenter bees, mason bees, and many wasps overwinter in stems you're about to cut and haul away.
• In leaf litter. Luna moth, swallowtail, and fritillary pupae overwinter in fallen leaves, as do bumblebee queens burrowed an inch or two into loose soil under litter. Raking a bed bare and bagging the leaves removes them.
• In seed heads. Which also feed goldfinches and juncos through winter.
• In the top inch of soil, where mated bumblebee queens hibernate alone.

What to do instead:

• Leave perennial stems standing through winter. In spring, cut them to 8 to 15 inches rather than to the ground, and leave those stubs standing. Bees nest in the cut ends that season, and new growth hides them by June.
• Wait to clean up. The old advice of waiting for several consecutive days above 50F is a reasonable rule of thumb. Mid to late spring is fine, and later is better.
• Leave leaves where they fall in beds and under shrubs. Rake them off the lawn and turf paths only.
• If you must remove stems, stack them in an out-of-the-way corner until midsummer so anything inside can emerge.
• Skip the fall tilling. It destroys ground nests and bumblebee hibernation sites in one pass.

Our guide to fall garden cleanup works through what genuinely needs removing, which is mostly diseased material, and what should simply be left alone.

Worked Example: A 10x10 Pollinator Corner

One hundred square feet, full sun, converted from lawn. Here's what it holds and what it costs in effort.

The planting, roughly 30 plants in clumps:

That leaves nothing in flower before April, so add 50 crocus bulbs planted in fall through the front edge. Crocus is one of the cheapest bulbs sold, it is sold by the bag rather than the bulb, and it naturalizes, so one fall planting covers the March gap for years. Total bloom coverage: March through hard frost, with never fewer than one clump in flower and usually two or three overlapping.

Water: one 12-inch plant saucer with a layer of river stones, refilled every 2 days, set at the sunny edge near clump 3.

Nesting: the 8 square foot bare patch, plus stems from clumps 3, 4, and 5 left standing all winter and cut to 12 inches in late spring.

Maintenance: water weekly the first season while roots establish, about 60 gallons per week over 100 square feet at 1 inch. After year one, most of these plants need no supplemental water in an average year. No fertilizer, since rich soil makes native perennials floppy. No pesticide, ever, in this bed. One spring cutback and nothing else.

What you get by year three: in a bed like this, expect to count 15 to 25 different bee species over a season if you look closely, along with monarchs on the milkweed, swallowtails, and hummingbirds on the bee balm and penstemon. Year one is quiet. Year two picks up. Year three is when it comes alive, because ground-nesting bees establish generationally and it takes them that long to build a local population.

Use the planting calendar to line up sowing and transplant dates, and the plant spacing calculator to work out how many plants each clump actually needs at mature spread.

FAQ

What is the fastest way to attract pollinators to my garden?

Fill the bloom gaps at the ends of the season and add water. Most gardens already have June covered, so plant crocus and willow-type early bloomers for March and April, plus aster and goldenrod for September and October, and set out a shallow dish with stones in it. Then stop spraying anything, especially while plants are in bloom.

Do bee hotels actually work?

Some do, most sold in garden centers do not. The common failures are tubes of the wrong diameter, tubes shorter than 6 inches, blocks that can't be opened for cleaning, and too many holes packed together, which concentrates parasites and disease. A hotel you don't maintain can kill more bees than it produces. A patch of bare, sunny, undisturbed soil helps far more, since about 70 percent of native bees nest in the ground.

What flowers attract the most pollinators?

Single, open-faced flowers native to your region, planted in clumps. Across most of North America the highest-value plants are goldenrod and aster for fall, bee balm, mountain mint, coneflower, and milkweed for summer, and willow, serviceberry, and crocus for the earliest spring. Skip double-flowered cultivars, which are often bred to the point of having little nectar or pollen.

Are native plants really better for pollinators?

For generalist bees, not dramatically. For specialists, yes, and that's a quarter to a third of native bee species, which can only raise young on pollen from a specific plant group. Butterflies show the same split: adults drink nectar from anything, but caterpillars eat particular host plants. Aim for about 70 percent regional natives and keep the ornamental nectar plants you like.

How do I give bees water without them drowning?

Use a shallow dish, a plant saucer works well, and fill it with stones or marbles that break the surface so insects can stand on dry rock and drink from the edge. Refresh every 2 to 3 days, which also stops mosquito larvae from maturing. Add a separate tray of damp sand with a pinch of salt for butterflies, which need minerals they can't get from nectar.

Is it safe to spray my garden if I do it carefully?

Never spray a plant that is in bloom, however careful the method. If a non-blooming plant genuinely needs treatment, work through cultural fixes first, then physical ones like row cover and hand picking, then biological controls, and only then consider a product. Choose the narrowest active-ingredient class for your specific pest, apply in the evening after foraging stops, and follow the label exactly, because the label is the law.

Should I clean up my garden in the fall?

Leave as much standing as you can. Native bees overwinter inside hollow stems, butterfly and moth pupae overwinter in leaf litter, and bumblebee queens hibernate in the top inch of soil under that litter. Remove diseased material and clear leaves off the lawn, then leave stems, seed heads, and bed leaves until mid to late spring, cutting stems to 8 to 15 inches rather than to the ground.

How long does a pollinator garden take to fill up?

Expect three seasons. Year one is quiet while perennials put down roots and produce few flowers. Year two brings noticeably more visitors as the clumps size up. Year three is when it comes alive, partly because the plants are mature and partly because ground-nesting bees build a local population generationally and need that long to establish nearby.

Updated August 2026