SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by tfried on Tuesday March 28 2017, @08:05AM
Yes and no. The problem with invasive species (well one of the problems, anyway), is that they tend to supplant the native ones (that's why they're called invasive, not, merely non-native). So you end up with a kind of monoculture. Now that monoculture may still make for an excellent bee feed, but only during the blooming period, which is typically going to be a few weeks or months, at most. But the bees will need food continually, from spring to autumn, which is why they depend on diversity.