The Great Sunflower Project

Summer is definitely here and many of you are enjoying the cheerful yellow blooms of your Lemon Queen Sunflowers. The days are long and the weather is perfect for enjoying a lazy morning watching bees in the garden. Make some time to enjoy watching what’s happening in your garden and spend 15 minutes making bee observations and sending in your data on our web site (www.greatsunflower.org).

In most of the country, it’s time to start gearing up for planting a bee-friendly garden. For very little effort, you can create beautiful habitat for native bees and abundant forage for honey bees. Sunflowers, of course, are the perfect start and, ‘Lemon Queen’ sunflowers are our preferred variety for making your bee observations. The reason we have a single variety of sunflower that we recommend is to make sure that we are comparing apples to apples! Some varieties of sunflower have no pollen so they will be less attractive and provide less food for bees.