Andrena sp. on Pearly Everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea)
For practical information on supporting wild pollinators, check out the following sources.
Gardening for native pollinators
Policies/strategies
Sources of native plants
Pollinator habitat on farmland
Homes for pollinators
Getting to know native pollinators
Identifying native plants
Pollinator researchers in Canada
Gardening for native pollinators
Nature Canada
Fact sheets on gardening for biodiversity: creating habitat and cultivating support for nature.
- Yard naturalization: a how-to guide
- Myths and misconceptions: naturalized gardens, ticks, mice, rats and other pests
- Bird-friendly gardens: supporting bird habitat for every season
- Good garden practices: underrated practices and top plant picks
Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library
Plan your garden
Advice and tips for all pollinator gardeners, from beginners wondering where to start, to those who want to improvie their practices, to detailed information on which plants are preferred by which pollinators.
The Corner Pollinator Garden
Right in urban Ottawa, Berit Erickson has created a diverse and beautiful garden for pollinators, and she’s created a web site to share her experience and inspire others: cornerpollinatorgarden.net
Just do it! Beginner native plant garden design for urban Ottawa (slides from a garden makeover webinar presented to the Enviro Crew of Old Ottawa South)
City of Guelph
Creating a pollinator garden
General how-to advice, plus valuable garden designs for a variety of sites, including shade, slope, boulevard, and rain gardens.
Canadian Wildlife Federation
Gardening for pollinators
Excellent and concise (4 pages) overview of pollinators, the challenges they face, and how you can help.
In Our Nature
Native plant profiles – sun, shade, moisture-loving, grasses and sedges, shrubs, edible traits.
Ontario Stewardship Councils
A landowners’ guide to conserving native pollinators in Ontario
This 44-page guide includes information about our local bees, the challenges they face, how you can help. Lots of ideas, case studies, resources.
Pollination Guelph
Our downloads
A series of how-to sheets, suggestions, information, and plant lists to help you help pollinators.
Pollinator Partnership Canada
Selecting plants for pollinators: a guide for gardeners, farmers, and land managers in the St. Lawrence Lowlands region
Includes a description of our region, the pollinators found there, what they need (food, shelter, water, and a long list of plants they prefer.
Friends of the Earth Canada
Bee & bee: create your own bed and breakfast for bumgle bees
How to provide food and create habitat for bumble bees. Includes best gardening practices, and a Bee & Bee sign for your garden.
David Suzuki Foundation
How to create a pollinator-friendly garden
Attracting bees, building a mason bee house, best plants by season, make a bee bath.
Wild Pollinator Partners
Signs to identify your garden as pollinator habitat
Supporting wild pollinators in community gardens
If the plants in your community garden are flowering and productive, you are already receiving the free services of wild pollinators. You can show your appreciation, attract even more pollinators, and support all beneficial insects by taking some — or all! — of the following measures.
Supporting wild pollinators at your faith community
Wild pollinators provide critical life-support services on this planet. Yet they are underappreciated and often overlooked. Faith communities, with their strong mandate to care for creation, are great allies in supporting a strong, resilient, biodiverse ecosystem, where native pollinators can flourish.
Rating pollinator habitat
Pollinators need space, food, water, and shelter for their populations to thrive. No matter the location, type, or size of the habitat, the flowering plants must provide nutrition and nesting space.
Seeds of Diversity Canada
Pollination Canada
Everything you need to know about supporting pollinators from why pollination is important to examples of gardens, farming, and other plantings.
Xerces Society
Pollinator conservation resources: Great Lakes region
Pollinator conservation resources: northeast region
Habitat assessment, habitat installation, plant lists, habitat management, and more.
Farms at Work
Nectar and pollen plants for native wild pollinators
Good list of trees, shrubs, and perennials known to attract pollinators, including information on bloom period, size, and growing requirements.
Policies/strategies
Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs
Pollinator health action plan
What the provincial government is doing to help bees and other wild pollinators: policy, public engagement, research, education.
Ministère du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et de la Lutte contre les changements climatiques (Quebec)
La protection des pollinisateurs (in French)
L’importance des pollinisateurs, leur état de santé, des actions pour les protéger au Québec, surtout en matière des néonicotinoïdes.
Sources of native plants
Watch for spring plant sales. But meanwhile, read up on over 200 species of native plants – characteristics, habitat and growing requirements, companion plants, and which pollinators use them.
Beaux Arbres
Bristol, Quebec
Specializing in plants native to the Ottawa Valley and garden-worthy wildflowers from eastern North America. Open most days from mid May until the end of September (please call ahead to confirm: 819 647-2404). Beaux Arbres brings seeds to local Seedy Saturdays and nursery plants to farmers’ markets, and specialty sales in Ottawa. Well worth the drive to see their demonstration gardens.
Connaught Nursery
Cobden Ontario
Site includes a woodland restored from “scratch.” Locally native wildflowers, ferns and mosses, vines, shrubs, and trees. Owners have over 30 years’ experience in horticulture, a wealth of information, and a passion for propagating local species.
Ferguson Tree Nursery
Kemptville, Ontario
Range of native trees and shrubs available as bare root stock (multiples of 10) or in pots (minimum of 10, mixed species). Limited number of perennials. Pre-ordering required.
Fletcher Wildlife Garden
Ottawa, Ontario
Annual native plant sale of wildflowers and some trees and shrubs: late May, early June.
North American Native Plant Society
Seed exchange.
Nursery for the Earth
Committed to helping you restore biodiversity, we sell plants that are considered native to within 100 km of our nursery in Bristol, Quebec. We also sell plants that are native to eastern North America and naturalized here. Trees, shrubs, vines, wildflowers, ferns, grasses, sedges, rushes.
Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library
Just like a regular library, the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library provides free seeds and plants that people can “check out” to grow in their own gardens. Once the plants have flowered and gone to seed, people can “return” some seeds to the library to make them available for other people.
Solidago Farm Native Plant Nursery
This family-operated small native plant nursery is located in Wakefield, Quebec. It sells plants grown from seed collected from the Ottawa/Gatineau region, with some select species from central or southern Ontario. See its website and Facebook page for more information and a plant list.
Pollinator habitat on farmland
Xerces Society
Pollinator conservation in agriculture
Establishing Pollinator Meadows from Seed
Pollinators and roadsides
Michigan State University: extension bulletin
Conserving native bees on farmland
United States Department of Agriculture: agroforestry notes
Enhancing nest sites for native crop pollinators
Farms at work
Homes for pollinators
Pollination Guelph
Xerces Society
Fletcher Wildlife Garden
Instructions for building a mason bee box
Great Pollinator Project
Getting to know wild pollinators
Wild Pollinator Partners’ resources
See our blog posts in the Meet the pollinators category – include posts on individual pollinator types as well as photos (and ID where known) from pollinator surveys
Luca’s identification guide
Slides from Jessica Forrest’s presentation showing the diversity of the main groups of local bees
Ohio State University webinar series
Tending nature: native plants and every gardener’s role in fostering biodiversity
6 presentations, featuring entomologists, gardeners, conservationists
AAFC
Native pollinators and agriculture in Canada
Canadian Wildlife Federation
Explore our pollinators
Pollinators: from flowers to food to our future
CRAAQ (Cultiver l’Expertise Diffuser le Savoir)
Guide d’identification et de gestion – Pollinisateurs et plantes mellifères
Heather Holm
Bees: an identification and native plant forage guide
Pollinators of native plants
Pollination Guelph
Pollination-pollinator overview
Jeff Skevington and Michelle Locke
Field guide to the flower flies of northeastern North America
TED talk: Joseph Wilson
Video: Save the bees! Wait, was that a bee?
Identifying native plants
WPP blog post
Wildflowers: what’s native? – includes local lists and assessments based on what has been found in our area by expert botanists
Fletcher Wildlife Garden
Photo galleries
Fleures du Québec
FloraQuebeca
Glossaire botanique, flore vasculaire, et plus
VASCAN
Database of vascular plants of Canada
Ontario Wildflowers
Online field guide on Ontario’s wildflowers
Canadian Wildlife Federation
Quick searches by plant name, gardening need/plant type and province.
Pollinator researchers in Canada
In our region
Sophie Cardinal, adjunct research professor, Carleton University
Developing new molecular and morphological tools to better understand our beneficial native pollinators.
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Jessica Forrest, assistant professor, University of Ottawa
Studying the evolutionary ecology of plant–pollinator interactions and exploring how pollinators and animal-pollinated plants are coping in a world that is getting hotter and more densely populated by humans.
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Heather Kharouba, assistant professor, University of Ottawa
Studying how and why species (butterflies, bumblebees) are responding to global change, and what those responses mean for ecological communities.
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Jeremy Kerr, professor, University of Ottawa
Discovering specific causes for biodiversity decline and degradation of ecosystem function, including pollination and pollinators.
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Ilona Naujokaitis-Lewis, research scientist, National Wildlife Research Centre, Environment and Climate Change Canada
Understanding demographic drivers of species responses to climate change and land-use land-cover change, including drivers of native pollinator declines and pollination potential modeling
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Risa Sargent, associate professor, University of Ottawa
Applying the principles of evolutionary ecology to questions about how plants interact with their biotic and abiotic environment, including the roles of pollinators in diverse environments.
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Jeff Skevington, adjunct research professor, research scientist, Carleton University
Assessing interactions and impacts between arthropod biodiversity and agricultural practices (including pollinating flies), developing a national arthropod information system and systematic knowledge of beneficial arthropods such as pollinators.
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Elsewhere in Canada
Sheila Colla, assistant professor, York University
“As pollinators and pollination have become important issues among policymakers and the public in recent years, my work has become more interdisciplinary.”
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Elizabeth Elle, professor, Simon Fraser University
“Human impacts go beyond fragmentation of habitat to other modifications. We are interested in how anthropogenic impacts from farming to logging to cattle grazing affect bee communities and pollination services. ”
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Valérie Fournier, assistant professor, Université Laval
Research projects linked with the issues of declining pollinators and their conservation in agricultural environments.
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Paul Galpern, associate professor, University of Calgary
Studying how landscape context and climate change affect wild pollinator status and decline, as well and pollination services in natural and agricultural landscapes.
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Scott MacIvor, assistant professor, University of Toronto
“The specific objective of my research program is to understand how people influence the ecology and diversity of plants and pollinators, and the interactions between them.”
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Lawrence Packer, professor of biology and environmental studies, York University
“I am a melittologist. A melittologist is someone whose main academic passion is the study of wild bees. This means someone who studies bees other than the domesticated western honey bee.”
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Nigel Raine, Rebanks Family Chair in Pollinator Conservation, University of Guelph
Nigel and members of the Raine Lab study the behaviour and ecology of pollinators, and the impacts of environmental stressors (e.g. pesticide exposure) on pollinator health.
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Cory Sheffield, curator of invertebrate zoology, Royal Saskatchewan Museum
“My research interests are primarily focused on all aspects of bees, including their diversity and taxonomy, ecology, and conservation with particular focus on the Canadian fauna.”
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