Bees. The word alone makes me wince with haunting hallucinations of ominous buzzing and a world of hurt. But I’m reconsidering the pointy-butted buggers (while keeping my epi-pen close, of course) because they can be of extreme value to all flower and food gardens worth their dirt. Without bee pollination, our produce counters and farmer’s markets would be noticeably leaner, having left the birds, butterflies, and the wind to pick up all the slack. Bumble bees are some of nature’s most prolific pollinators and they promote flourishing flora wherever they reside, commonly in underground hives just below the soil’s surface.

Now don’t go digging up a bunch of angry nests in the park just yet. The idea here is to create an inviting, hospitable dwelling that attracts the bees; a cool, dark, dry place happily nestled between the tomato vines and snapdragons. Many commercial greenhouse growers have been using this bee-based method as a preferred alternative to time-consuming manual pollination for quite some time and it has proven to be a successful, efficient, and sustainable way to guarantee more abundant harvests year after year.

Nowadays, the booming groups of penny-pinching, eco-minded, and green-thumbed citizens, including our popular trend-setting victory gardener over at the White House, can certainly benefit from the same exact process on a much more domestically convenient scale. Such a solution would take form as a small man-made hive structure, placed low to the ground within the planting area confines, very much like Jason Neufeld’s ceramic Bombus Shelters. Imagine your favorite garden gnome…okay, which looks nothing like a gnome, with more modern styling, that houses bees, and helps your garden grow. It’s like pre-fabricated housing for living fertilizer specifically designed to bring the buzz right into your own backyard.

While all variations of Bombus Shelters keep within the same proportions, they vary in shape and feature attractive, nature-inspired forms for us, with cavernous, low-moisture interiors for them. So when all else fails, welcoming a hungry, home-seeking bumble bee colony into your garden just might be the best answer to filling out those flowerbeds and your salad bowl.