We always have plenty of flowers for bees. Whatever species of bee doesn't matter because increasing the overall food supply helps them all out. Add some plants that the butterflies like. Work it out to cover the seasons.

A supply of fresh water is necessary but is forgotten by most. Tip out once weekly to control mozzies.

It is easy to provide homes for some native bees. Just Google.

I have too much on to do it ATM, but there is a supplier of the (stingless) native bees for honey and I would like to buy a hive or two.

NathanJ, Get a planter box and some water going. Easy to do your bit.

I had a very large native bee nest/hive they had built on the outside of the trunk of one of the cadagi gums in my house windbreak. At the same time I was breeding day lilies.

It wasn't the honeybees that gave me a problem, but the natives. They would be out at very first light, & would have collected every scrap of pollen from dozens of flowers every morning, before even the birds stirred.

I not only had to cover the flower buds I wanted to fertilise, but the ones I wanted to harvest pollen from as well.

I don't think they were fertilisers of the lilies, I never had a single set of seed from flowers otherwise than those I had hand fertilised.

I think we would starve if we depended on them for food crops.

Yes onthebeach, I noticed them at the bird bath, & lots of them on the outside of a cement tank that was weeping. They could gather moisture from very damp concrete, & appeared to need a lot of it in SEQ.

Mine are not stingless, as I found when I lifted a couple out of the middle of the birdbath on a finger tip, but the sting was no more than a pin prick. They are a brown/grey colour with 2 yellow stripes around them, rather like wasp colouring. I have not found a photo of them on the net, but have not tried too hard either.

We are in regular close contact, but get along quite happily using the "I won't trouble you if you don't trouble me system". They must be fairly formidable, as I have not seen anything attacking them, & the nest is undamaged in over 14 years.

Oh no some academic was given money and came to the same conclusion that they all do! We need more research/money. You have to laugh don't you. This is the second thing that Eisenhower (The first was the military industrial complex) warned the world of.
I shall love and cherish all bees regardless of race, gender and ethnicity, not forgetting the GLTG community.
NathanG keep your racism to yourself and take a good long look at yourself tsk tsk tsk!

Hasbeen,

I used to grow a lot of Daylilies myself, along with my other favourites, iris, roses and dahlias. It was truly amazing how fragile Daylily flowers appear yet the plants are robust, requiring little care if supplied with regular litter. Apart from some lemon coloured drifts that I liked for effect, mine were in large beds producing a profusion of colour.

The sad story is that I rented that house for a time and the very first tenant decided to grow vegetables (unsuccessful, even killed the existing veggie bed), destroying the gardens in the process. The yard was a brown wasteland of introduced weeds in such a very short time it was amazing. Sometime you just walk away and put the contract mower in.