By ADRIAN HIGGINS The Washington Post
Books, websites, whole organizations are in place to show you how to draw bees and other pollinators to your garden. But what if you don't want them?
The notion might seem ridiculous to many of us: Gardeners are by nature worried about nature and all its contemporary ills. We can install plants that will throw a lifeline to beleaguered honeybees, bumblebees and butterflies while creating gardens that are natural, floriferous and free of pesticides. Who wouldn't want to do that? Cnidophobiacs -- folks who harbor a fear of insect stings.
A bee or wasp sting will induce one of three basic reactions in people. For most of us, the sting is a painful but localized event, and the pain and swelling will recede in a matter of hours. Some people get a moderate reaction that causes a limb to swell or hives to appear away from the sting site, and the symptoms last for days. A third group faces a life-threatening, systemic reaction called anaphylaxis. A person might develop a severe reaction even if previous stings evoked a milder one.
Still, it is fair to say that the fear of getting stung is greater than the risk. Less than 1 percent of people who are stung go into anaphylactic shock. An estimated 40 people die each year in the United States from insect stings, about the same number as from lightning strikes. More than 30,000 are killed in automobile accidents yearly. We blithely grab our car keys but grow anxious about getting stung in the garden. People who are allergic to a yellow jacket sting might not be to honeybee stings, but that distinction is often lost.
"I have seen people with a strong or even local reaction become hysterical and consider that a systemic reaction," said John Oppenheimer, an allergist and clinical professor of medicine at Rutgers University. "No one likes being stung, and (stings) are very frightening," he said.
I'm a bee lover, and I do everything I can to identify, understand and help the dozens of species of bees and wasps that are drawn to my garden. I dislike yellow jackets but know other wasps as a class gardeners call "beneficials" -- tiny helpers that take care of a host of plant pests, from aphids to destructive larvae.
If we were being utterly rational, we would avoid gardening not because of bees but because of other arthropods -- namely mosquitoes, ticks, biting flies and some midges, which seek us out to suck our blood.
Recently, a reader with a bee-phobic relative emailed to ask whether it is possible to design a garden that would draw fewer pollinators. This idea runs counter to prevailing ecological sensibilities, as a garden designer named Louis Raymond discovered when he was asked to put together a bee-less landscape for a client worried about her grandchildren getting stung while playing outside.
He found that there were few, if any, reliable lists of plants that would dissuade bees.
"What I realized pretty soon was that there was nothing you could do to repel any of these animals. What you can do is plant things that aren't of interest," he said.
Because bees and wasps need nectar, and some species harvest pollen as well, Raymond first turned to plants that don't rely on such pollinators to reproduce. These include grasses and sedges; wind-pollinated shade trees such as oaks and maples; ferns; bamboos; and a host of conifers, small and large.
Of nectar plants, he uses those whose flower form evolved for pollination by creatures other than bees -- his list includes flowering tobacco, trumpet vine, yuccas, bananas, palms and hardy, ground-hugging woodland gingers that are designed for slug pollination.
He uses hostas, grown primarily for their foliage, and makes a point of cutting off their emerging flower stalks. You could apply the same principle to other foliage plants, heucheras, brunneras, coleus, cannas and liriope, for example.
