- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
To attract honey bees to your garden, it's a good idea to let the artichokes flower.
Sure, you could pick them for your dinner, but you'd be depriving honey bees of theirs.
At the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at UC Davis, the artichokes are beginning to flower. The haven, a half-acre bee friendly garden, is a demonstration garden planted next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road.
It's open from dawn to dusk (no admission fee). The key goals of the garden are to provide bees with a year-around food source, to raise public awareness about the plight of honey bees, and to encourage visitors to plant bee-friendly gardens of their own. It also serves as a research garden.
The Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven is a treasure, and fulfilling the needs of bees adds to that treasure.
"Native to the Mediterranean (Hickman 1993), artichoke thistle became widespread on over 150,000 acres of California rangeland and also in Australia, New Zealand, and South America on grazing lands, especially the Argentine pampas (Thomsen et al. 1986). It is now recognized as the wild form of the cultivated globe artichoke, Cynara scolymus L. When grown from divisions of the perennial crown, globe artichoke will reliably produce the spineless, edible flowerhead and plant known to agriculture, but grown from seed it often reverts to a wild form, producing the inch-long spines around the flowerhead normally found on C. cardunculus (Thomsen et al. 1986).
...."