Bees & Camellias
Fall brings an abundance of bees to the garden with all of the Camellia sasanqua and Camellia Sinensis in full swing. They are one of the last plants of the season to help our bees with enough pollen for the winter. Our garden is just buzzing with bees this time of year. For those who are allergic to bees, you may want to be careful, but for the rest of us, they are really very docile during this time. They are so busy collecting pollen that they don’t think much about anything else. Later in the season, Camellia japonica and other species will take up where the fall plants leave off. The bees will keep on feeding through the winter as long as the flowers keep blooming.
Bees on Camellias, and especially on Tea, creates such a great symbiotic relationship! They collect pollen from the flowers and produce honey while their pollination makes more flowers, which produces more seeds, which grows more plants and the cycle keeps on going!
Don’t Harm the Bees….
What we don’t want to do is cause them any harm. So while your plants are in bloom you should exercise extreme caution in applying any type of insecticides that could harm the bees. This includes topical and systemic insecticides. There is not really anything that has to be done to your camellias in the way of chemicals that won’t wait until blooming is over.