34 Great Resources for Learning About Bees, Butterflies, and Other Pollinators

Looking for sustainable gardening information on inviting bees, beetles, butterflies, and other beneficial insects into your garden? How to identify which ones are visiting your backyard? Learning about the lifestyles of the honey-makers and nectar-sippers? 

Explore the Sustainable Gardening Library’s Topics app to learn from the experts at public gardens and arboreta, colleges and universities, and government agencies. They’re sharing their knowledge all in one place, so you don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web.

Thirty-four organizations from Maine to Miami and Seattle to Suffolk, are sharing their photos, posters, research, and tip sheets with us to help you identify and support beneficial insects in your geographic region and plant hardiness zone.

Just go to the Library’s Topics Directory, and select the Beneficial Insects icon to open up an interactive map that shows the locations of our content providers.



Click on any map pin to open a popup that provides collaborator details and a link to the materials they’ve contributed to the Sustainable Gardening Library.

You’ll find a wide variety of things to enjoy, including the Arnold Arboretum’s recommendations for selecting spring-flowering shrubs that are pollinator magnets, New Jersey Highlands Coalition’s video on lost butterflies of New Jersey, Santa Barbara Botanic Garden’s native California plant list for pollinators, the University of Washington Botanic Garden’s  60 years of beekeeping history, and much more.

Today’s Top Tip: Choose plants that are native to your location because they’ve co-evolved with pollinators that have adapted to local environmental conditions over a long period of time.

Check out the video tutorials on our YouTube Channel featured to learn more about the Sustainable Gardening Library.

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