In the past few months, I’ve received a few emails from people interested in planting their own pollinator garden in Puerto Rico. So, here I finally provide you with that information.

As some of you know, in 2013, I did some research in agricultural fields in Santa Isabel and Juana Diaz, where I collected bees and identified the plants on which they were foraging. From that research, NRCS published a short fact-sheet, which they based off of my final report. Though NRCS was able to squeeze in most of the information into the fact-sheet, they weren’t able to get everything from the 50 page report.

Below is a link to the PDF with the complete list of native and introduced plants on which I documented the bees foraging on.

List of native and introduced plants with images.
Note that this work was supported by a Natural Resources Conservation Service grant (68-F352-12-008) and NCSU Department of Applied Ecology.

Please refer to the bees listed in my “carribean bee ids” if you want to learn more about the bees foraging on each of those plants. If you see “E_” and “L_species”, those names are referring to Exomalopsis species and Lasioglossum species, respectively. I wasn’t able to determine which species was foraging on the plant, in the field…was only able to identify them to genus. The Lasioglossum species (L_species) are currently being revised by Jason Gibbs. Apparently some of the species in Puerto Rico were misidentified, and some of them are new to the island. Once he publishes his paper on the Caribbean Lasioglossum, I’ll share a link to it, for anyone who’s interested.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any other questions I can address. I’m really happy that my blog is helping promote pollinator friendly gardens in Puerto Rico 🙂