Bee populations are in decline, and Cheerios wants to help. So far, so good. But they are sending free packets of wildflower seeds to people all over the country—and some of the flowers included are invasive species that, in some areas, you should probably not plant.
Forget-me-not (listed above but, the seed packager told me on 3/21/2017, not included in the seed mix) is banned as a noxious weed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example. The California poppy is nice in California, but listed as an "invasive exotic pest plant" in southeastern states. And many of the flowers on this list are not native to anywhere in the US, so they are not necessarily good matches for our local bees.
http://lifehacker.com/don-t-plant-those-bee-friendly-wildflowers-cheerios-i-1793370883
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @04:28AM
Those packets ought to be illegal. What's OK in one part of the country can completely destroy the environment in another. California poppies around here are a mild problem, but in other places they take over.
Really, if you're going to grow random plants, they should at least not be known invasives.