We just met a male black-faced bumble bee, Bombus californicus.

It was early morning and he was resting on a blanket flower (Gaillardia), a brilliant member of the sunflower family. When you're a bee, a blanket flower offers both bed and breakfast.

Gaillardia was named after M. Gaillard de Charentonneau, an 18th-century French magistrate who was a patron of botany, according to Wikipedia.  "The common name may refer to the resemblance of the inflorescence to the brightly patterned blankets made by Native Americans."

The bumble bee species, a native, takes its name from California. Unlike the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, its face is black and long. (Except when it's covered with golden pollen.)

Authors Kate Frey and Gretchen LeBuhn in their newly published book, The Bee Friendly Garden, note that unlike honey bees, bumble bees can fly in "cold rainy weather...They have several physiological adaptations that allow them to fly in bad weather, including the ability to shiver to raise their body temperature."

Frey, a world-class garden designer and LeBuhn, a bee expert and professor at San Francisco State University, offer advice on how to attract bumble bees and other pollinators to your garden. They quote native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, and the co-author of Bumble Bees of North America: And Identification Guide and California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners.

What we know is this: it's good to have bed and breakfast for a bumble bee. Much of the bumble bee population is declining and we all need to do what we can to protect them and provide for them.

Sometimes when you walk through a bee garden, you feel Mother Nature tugging at your arm, pulling you from one breathtaking area to another. You resist the tug and want to linger, to admire the diversity of bees, to marvel at the colors and patterns of the flowers.

That's how we felt when we recently visited the one-acre pollinator bee garden of Kate Frey and her artist husband, Ben, in Hopland, Mendocino County. It's magical.

Kate, a world-class garden designer, and bee expert Gretchen LeBuhn, professor in the San Francisco State University, have just co-authored The Bee-Friendly Garden, an educational, enthusiastic and inspiring book that will help you turn your own garden--large or small, rural or urban--into something magical.

Among her many honors, Kate Frey twice won gold medals at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show in London and received a Silver Gilt award in 2003. She met Queen Elizabeth, who admired her work. Currently Kate directed and taught at Sonoma State University's Sustainable Landscape Program with Extended Education, and consults for various wineries and residences around California, including  The Melissa Garden in Healdsburg (privately owned and now closed) and Lynmar Estate Winery in Sebastopol.  Her website, http://freygardens.com, offers more information about her and her mission. It's all about the pollinators and how to attract them!

Gretchen LeBuhn is interested in “both the evolutionary ecology of plants and the conservation of their pollinators,” she writes on her website. “My lab focuses on the effects of climate change on bumble bee species in alpine environments as well as the effects of urbanization on wildlife.” She directs the Great Sunflower Project, a citizen science project designed to evaluate the effects of landscape change on pollinator service in North America.

The Frey/LeBuhn team says it well in the preface: “Bee gardens make people happy. Whether you enjoy a brilliant chorus of saturated color, a tranquil sanctuary from the busy world, or a hardworking edible garden, there is a glorious, flower-filled bee garden waiting for you.”

And dozens of pollinators await. “Bees are a critical link in the global food chain,” they write. "Bees are the world's most prolific pollinators...Over 70 percent of the world's plants depend on the pollination of bees, including many nuts, fruits, tomatoes, peppers, or berries."

They cover:

• The Benefits of a Bee Friendly Garden
• Our Friends, the Bees
• Plants for Your Bee Friendly Garden
• Bee Friendly Plants for Edible Gardens
• Bee Garden Basics
• Designing Your Bee Garden
• Beyond Your Own Backyard: Becoming a Bee Activist

Their book also contains resources, and regional plant lists for the Southeast, South Central, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest regions, Rocky Mountain/Intermountain West Region and the Northeast/Midwest/Mid-Atlantic Region.

They spotlight a wide diversity of bees with text and photos and delve into their habitats, floral resources and other needs. In addition to listing plants that draw pollinators, they also list plants that are unattractive to bees. They include ferns, Gazania, day lily and Sago palm.

The Frey/LeBuhn team recommends that you “keep a notebook throughout the year and write down the names of plants and which bees are visiting them. This is a fun and informative exercise wherever you go—from your home, to visiting friends, to walks around the neighborhood or anywhere you go in the world,” they write. “Much information can be gleaned this way, much discovered and much shared. Everyone can be a local expert.”

We love the photos of pollinators and gardens in the book—many taken in the Frey garden and in the Melissa Garden.  They also focus on small-scale gardening—you don't need a huge space for a bee garden. (The urban Garvey garden is an example!)

Laurie Davies-Adams, executive director of the Pollinator Partnership, says that “this book will make bees happy and healthy in gardens across the country.” 

Yes, and people, too!

(Note: The Frey garden will be open June 18 for the Garden Conservancy Open Days Program. See https://www.gardenconservancy.org/open-days/garden-directory/frey-gardens. Here is the entire schedule:  https://www.gardenconservancy.org/events/all-events/mendocino-county-ca-open-day-3)

This is no ordinary calendar.

We just previewed the second annual North American Native Bee calendar and it's just absolutely spectacular.

Created by UC Berkeley-alumnus Celeste Ets-Hokin, a native bee advocate from the San Francisco Bay Area, the calendar is a fundraising project for the Great Sunflower Project and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

The macro images, primarily the work of UC Berkeley-trained entomologist/insect photographer Rollin Coville, are stunning. Coville, who received his doctorate in entomology from UC Berkeley in 1978, has been photographing insects and spiders for more than 25 years.

The calendar is unique in that each month not only features a "pin-up" photo of a bee but also includes notes on preferred plants, nesting needs, and guidance on how to identify the genus. It's like zeroing in on the lifestyles of the not-so-rich and not-so-famous, the ones that share your garden with honey bees. You can preview a sample of the front cover, one month, and back cover of the calendar.

The calendar idea originated with Gretchen LeBuhn, an environmental science professor at San Francisco State University. She's the one who launched the Great Sunflower Project. What's the Great Sunflower Project about? Members plant sunflowers in their garden, monitor bee visits and report back to LeBuhn. "The Great Sunflower Project currrently boasts an online membership of about 80,000 citizen scientists from across the United States and Canada," Ets-Hokin said.

Back to the calendars. This year the theme is "Bees and Food."

A good theme, a good cause, and a good place to learn about the many species of bees, including leafcutter bees, sweat bees and bumble bees, and how to attract them.

The 2010 calendar was so popular that it sold out. The 2011 calendar promises to be even more popular. In fact, the project coordinators are now taking orders. Orders received by Oct. 15 will be shipped the third week of October, Ets-Hokin said. Orders received by Nov. 30 will be shipped the first week of December.

I have it on my calendar. Only problem is, I don't want to part with my 2010 North American Bee Calendar.

If you enjoy sunflowers--and the seeds and oil--thank a bee.

Sunflowers, native to the Americas, are spectacular, especially when you encounter a field of them. If you look closely, you'll see honey bees, sunflower bees and bumble bees working the flowers.

It's pollination at work.

To encourage backyard gardeners to grow sunflowers and collect data about the bees that visit them, the Great Sunflower Project provides free seeds and educational information.

You can obtain the Lemon Queen sunflower seeds from the Great Sunflower Project, from a local nursery or from a seed catalog.

Associate professor and biologist Gretchen LeBuhn of the University of California, Santa Barbara, started the project in 2008 as a way to get citizens interested in bee pollination. 

"In 2008, we started this project as a way to gather information about our urban, suburban and rural bee populations," writes LeBuhn, considered "the queen bee" of the Great Sunflower Project. "We wanted to enlist people all over the U.S. and Canada to observe their bees and be citizen scientists. We asked them to plant sunflowers in their gardens so we could standardize study of bee activity and provide more resources for bees. Sunflowers are relatively easy to grow and are wildly attactive to bees."

Since 2008, the Great Sunflower Project has expanded its list of plants studied to include bee balm, cosmos, rosemary, coreopsis (tickseed), and purple coneflower.

"It’s time to turn off your television, take off those earphones, shut down that computer, go outside, and rediscover the wonder of nature," LeBuhn says.

Good advice.

That's one small step toward improving bee habitat--and human habitat, too.