How to Attract Pollinators to Your Garden This Summer

Rixlie Fozilova
4 min readMay 13, 2021

If you want to provide food for bees and butterflies in your garden, then these are the plants and conditions they like.

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Lately, the whole world has been focused on bees, and rightfully so! From a viral TikTok video that gained 78 million views, to articles here on Medium, the importance and preservation of our buzzing friends was accentuated.

As an urban plant grower, bees and other insects are an essential part of my garden. They pollinate the flowers and vegetables, and it is always nice to treat them by planting plants they like.

Last year, I planted several pots of zucchini on my balcony that kept flowering, but the blooms never produced any fruit. After a frustrating harvest, I learned that some vegetable plants produce two kinds of flowers that have to pollinate each other.

However, since I had no pollinators which don’t only include bees, but also hummingbirds, butterflies, and beetles, my flowers did not cross-pollinate to produce even a single zucchini.

Therefore, this year, attracting pollinators will be my primary goal in addition to planting a vegetable garden.

After some thorough research, I learned that pollinators are important to the reproductive success of more than 75% of flowering plants and is acquited to water and sunlight.

In this article, I would like to cover the best plants to grow if you would like to attract pollinators like bees, butterflies, and other useful bugs to your garden this summer!

First of all, what is pollination?

Pollination is a process of transferring the pollen from the flower’s male parts to the female parts of the same species. That’s how plants reproduce. Most plants rely on pollinators to do it, but it can also happen through wind and water. To attarct them, flowers produce nectar and when it gets collected by bees, the pollen gets transferred.

Which plants do they like?

Pixabay at Pexels
Rixlie Fozilova

Freelance writer and engineer in training with a passion for climate science and sustainable solutions. New article every Tuesday and Friday.