Now that we’re headed into the fall, perhaps your flower garden is starting to look a bit funereal; mine certainly is. But now’s a perfect time to start thinking about what to plant next spring!

If you’re thinking that it’s time for “something completely different,” as they used to say between Monty Python skits, you might want to consider a “bee pasture.”

Bee pastures are just small patches of wildflowers—but specifically wildflowers that are particularly alluring to bees. That’s the idea from an Agricultural Research Service entomologist who says bee pastures can help grow larger generations of healthy, hardworking bees needed to pollinate our crops.

Today millions of bees are needed every year to pollinate orchards and fields. But the “heavy hitters” of pollination are honey bees, and as you’ve no doubt heard, they’re having a hard time these days, thanks to a mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder, or CCD.

When CCD first came on the scene in the winter of 2006-2007, some beekeepers were reporting losses of 30 to 90 percent of their hives. The situation has improved in recent years, but in the most recent survey conducted, about 26 percent of apiaries surveyed reported that at least some of their bees died of CCD.

The idea of bee pastures is to encourage other types of bees to be fruitful and multiply so they can carry some of the pollination load. Over the past few years, the ARS scientists have been studying these wild “non-honey bees” and trying to figure out how we can put them to work on pollination chores.

For example, there’s a fairly new contender, a good-sized, metallic green creature called the osmia bee, that’s turning out to be a prolific pollinator of raspberries and blackberries. These plants are actually self-pollinating, which means they can supply their own pollen and form fruit without visits from pollen-bearing insects—but the insect visits can make the plump berries up to 30 percent bigger.

Interestingly, the osmia bees are more efficient than the honey bee, because they’re into multi-tasking. They combine their outdoor errands, always gathering both pollen and nectar in a single visit to a bloom, whereas a honey bee might just drop by to sip some nectar and ignore the pollen on that trip.

And then there’s the blue orchard bee, another gentle but hard-working wild bee. ARS scientists say planting bee pastures as welcoming homes for native blue orchard bees could boost the bees’ populations by as much as four- to five-fold per year.

Done on a commercial basis, here’s how the bee pastures would work:

Blue orchard bees would be taken out of a bee manager’s winter storage and brought to the pasture, where they would emerge from their cocoons, mate, and if female, lay eggs before dying.

The next year, some of the new generation of bees that developed from those eggs would be brought to commercial almond orchards to pollinate the trees’ creamy blossoms. But most of that generation would be returned to their parents’ pasture to produce another, hopefully larger, generation.

Because one of the greatest pollination needs is in the California almond orchards, the ARS scientists thus far have studied wildflowers that might be ideal for planting bee pastures in California, particularly early-flowering annuals.

They’ve come up with a first-ever list of five top-choice, bee-friendly wildflowers for tomorrow’s bee pastures in almond-growing regions. These native California plants are Chinese houses (Collinsia heterophylla), California five-spot (Nemophila maculata), baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii), lacy or tansy phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia), and California bluebell (Phacelia campanularia). These wildflowers are rich in pollen and nectar, and are reasonably easy to grow. Also, their seed is commercially available.

Maybe you don’t live anywhere near California, and these flowers might not grow in your area—but there are other bee-friendly flowers like Echinacea that will grow as far east as my backyard in Maryland. Just ask at your local garden center about bee-attracting flowers, and they’ll be able to advise you. So wherever you are, when you’re planning your next spring garden, you can do your bit to boost our pollinator population.

Just remember: “More bees, please!”

The Agricultural Research Service is the chief in‑house scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

You can read more about ARS discoveries at http://www.ars.usda.gov/news.