Gazing on this view of my back garden last month, I couldn’t help but notice the many, many bees and butterflies spending time on the Joe Pye Weed, then checking out the Black-eyed Susans before rejecting them in favor of the orange Lantana blooms, where they also settled in for a good drink. 

And it wasn’t the first time I’d noticed insects’ apparent lack of interest in our beloved Black-eyed Susans, Maryland’s state flower.

So I asked a native-plant gardener friend if she saw better action on hers and the answer was no, but she suggested there may be moths feeding on them at night, unnoticed by me. Good point.

So I turned to Reddit’s native plant gardening sub and boy, did they have answers! Eighty-one of them, writing from who knows where, and location is probably relevant, but their answers are sure interesting.)

Pollinators seen on Black-eyed Susans

Most of the comments were like this one: “Massive amounts of our smaller, native bees, even some specialist bees.” And collectively, the commenters mention these critters seen on their Black-eyed Susans. 

Sweat bee,  minor bee, hoverfly (which have larvae that eat aphids) and leafcutter bee.  The leafcutter, I learned, “cuts the leaves, then flies off with them to build nest chambers. If you ever find a cigar-like brown papery tube about the thickness of a cigarette tucked somewhere, that’s got a few chambers, each with a grub and a packet of pollen in it. The grubs grow inside until the next summer when they chew their way out as adults and repeat the cycle.“ Fascinating!

I looked them all up and this collection of photos shows their size on a hand, which helps a lot in IDing them. 

More praise for Black-eyed Susans:

• They’re a “food source for the larvae of the Emerald and silvery checkerspot butterflies.“
• “They host six different butterflies and moths.”
• “Assassin bugs, and spiders use the plant for shelter and camouflage.”
• “I’ve never seen a butterfly or bumblebee, but tiny bees and bugs take a huge interest in them. Some itty-bitties that I’ve never seen before with cool colors!!!!”
• “Tons of birds that love to eat the seeds off of the dead heads.”
• “The goldfinches arrive with their cute little ‘cheep-cheeps’ and eat these seeds and then make a mess to sow next year‘s seeds, which is great because BES is biennial.”

And here’s a butterfly I saw on my Black-eyed Susans last week -the pearl crescent. 

Mixed reviews

• “I mostly see crab spiders on mine in the meadow, but they may be waiting for something.”
• “Very infrequent, butterflies, or larger, bumblebee, and carpenter bee.”
• “In my garden bed, pollinators go to them when there’s less of everything else. I like to keep them because they have such a long bloom time and birds eat the seeds.”

Maybe it’s a matter of timing 

• “Rudbeckia mostly provides pollen, which is only interesting to foraging female bees during their nesting season. If you have any nesting bees around, there’s a good chance they already foraged what they could from the rudbeckia and moved on.“
• “If observed later in the season after the pollen has been exhausted, will not see insects. If you see yellow dots of pollen around the black center, it still has pollen.”
• “The flowers are so long-lasting that they stay attractive far past their use to pollinators, so visitation is brief when they first open. I do think that they are a good gateway plant, though, as they are quite attractive and easy. So they are good to ease someone into native plants.“
• “For the first week or two after they bloom, they don’t get many visitors. Then pollen visibly develops on the flowers, and they are covered with many species of small bees for the next month or so. Then eventually they stop attracting pollinators that are pretty.”

WHICH Rudbeckia?  If it’s ‘Goldstrum Goldsturm,’ is it useless? (Thx to a commenter for correcting my spelling)

It gets a lot more complicated when you try to figure out which Rudbeckia you have, and god forbid if it’s a Goldsturm! 

• “I’ve noticed about 1 million tiny bees on my Rudbeckia triloba.” Okay so far.
• “R. hirta is far more attractive to pollinators than fulgida, which is unfortunate because ‘Goldsturm’ is a hugely popular cultivar of our of fulgida.
• “‘Goldsturm’ gets pollinators, but it tends to be the smaller solitary ones like tiny flies and sweat bees. Suggest planting it and fulgida, which would fit nicely in a shorter layer in front of the hirta.”
• “I believe ‘Goldsturm’ may be sterile. It doesn’t seem to produce seeds and needs to be vegetative propagated, so it would not surprise me if there is no noticeable pollen or nectar for pollinating.”
• “‘Goldsturm’ is hard to start from seed and needs to be vegetative propagated and it seems like a dud with pollinators, so my guess would be there’s a lack of pollen and nectar. It may still be an effective larval host plant.”
• “If those are native Rudbeckia, yes. If they are nativars such as Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’ from the nursery, then no they will attract butterflies, but no bees.”
• “One thing I’ve noticed is my Native species outperform my ‘Goldsturm’ cultivar of ours 10 to 1. If you have a cultivar, our swap them for natives.“

But why would that be? That’s a question asked in another post titled “Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’ is a big zero for pollinator value.”

Yeah, there isn’t an obvious reason why they’d be worse than the species for pollinators. There is no alteration to the flower form that would make it hard for them to access. Compact habit in the plants is not a change that generally turns the flowers into a pollinator disaster. The fact that it flowers prolifically and (in my hands at least) doesn’t throw off seedling volunteers may mean that it isn’t producing pollen, or that the pollen is low-quality.

I asked Redditors for help identifying my Black-eyed Susans and got no responses. Maybe it’s because, as a local friends told me, “Who knows what I have? I’ve had so many over the years, from various sources.” Yeah, that tracks. I don’t think I’ve ever bought them myself  – they’re so easy to get as passalongs.

Are neighboring plants more popular?

One Redditor saw the Joe Pye Weed near the Rudbeckia in my garden and wrote that “Joe Pye is a nectar bomb, so they’re distracted.” Indeed, Joe is the apparent favorite. 

Here in my front garden last month, Black-eyed Susans have even more competition for the attention of pollinators – Joe Pye, wood aster, bronze fennel and Profusion Zinnias in the foreground. Even closer are Magellan Zinnias (in two shades of pink), and one lone but very popular ‘Blue Fortune’ Anise hyssop.

So Rudbeckias shouldn’t dominate pollinator gardens?

One Redditor commented on the big picture. “The ratio of number of pollinators to size of a Rudbeckia patch is extremely low. It’s an inefficient use of space at a time when so much native land is being destroyed for housing and industry. Mountain mint spreads like Rudbeckia and attracts infinitely more nectar drinkers. For pollen, grow Asters“ 

Andrena Rudbeckiae. Photo credit: Sam Droege for the USDA Wild Bee Lab.

Similarly, Sam Droege, director of the federal Wild Bee Lab near me, wrote on Instagram: “There seems to be a dependence on this species to form a core part of many pollinator meadows and plantings and I would suggest that that should be dialed back a bit and a greater diversity of plants brought in. Andrena Rudbeckiae is a specialist on this plant but only seems to show up in more naturalized situations and I have yet to see it in any suburban planting.”

In another post he wrote about Rudbeckia: “For bees, this is no mountain mint. Black-eyed Susans are perhaps the most widely planted native plant in America. At least in the East, it does get visits by bees,  but part of that is just due to the volume of plantings. If you plant something that often, eventually everything shows up on it.”

(Sam’s Bee Lab is slated for closure, you won’t be surprised to learn.)

I decide not to give Rudbeckias more space in my garden

Well, I HAD been considering using extras, of which there are always plenty, to fill in a blank spot in my garden, but knowing all this, I won’t.  (I’m researching flowering shrubs instead.)

Black-eyed Susans filling up space after hedge removal.  I’ve given away about 80 percent of it and there’s always more.

A better use of my extras is giving them to people just starting their garden.  As full-grown perennials, they’ll bloom right away, while new plants are still sleeping and creeping.  Over time, extras can be edited out to make room.  As a local friend said to me about this plant: “They were very useful at the beginning for sure, to fill space quickly and easily with bright cheery not-too-tall blooms, but I have very few left now.”

That’s what I did to fill the space in my front garden after removing my much-hated Arborvitae hedge. I now have just one small patch of Black-eyed Susans, as shown in the earlier photo.