Blue-Banded Bees and Why Your Tomatoes Need Them

August 20, 2025

If your tomato plant flowers beautifully and then drops most of them, or the fruit comes out small and a bit misshapen, the problem is often not the plant and not the soil. It is that nothing has shaken the flower properly.

Some flowers will not let go of their pollen

Tomatoes, chillies, capsicums and eggplants hold their pollen inside the flower where a honeybee cannot get at it by crawling around. It has to be vibrated out, and that is a specific trick called buzz pollination, where the bee grips the flower and vibrates its flight muscles until the pollen shakes loose. Honeybees cannot do it. Blue-banded bees can, and they are native and they are already here.

You will have seen one without knowing

They are smaller than a honeybee, faster, and they have bright bands across the abdomen that look pale blue in the sun. They dart rather than potter, and they are solitary rather than living in a hive, so you are looking for individuals rather than a swarm.

Worth knowing, because it comes up: bumblebees are not the answer here. They are not present on mainland Australia and cannot legally be brought in. Any advice built around attracting bumblebees to a South Australian garden is advice for somewhere else.

How to bring them in

Plant natives that flower, because that is what they feed on when your vegetables are not flowering, and something like dianella, grevillea or native rosemary will do the job. Leave a patch that is not tidy, with some bare ground, a few hollow stems and a bit of undisturbed soil, because solitary bees nest in exactly that sort of neglected corner. Grow a range of things rather than one crop so there is something flowering across more of the year. And go easy on the spray, because a broad application takes out the pollinator along with the pest, and the pest comes back first.

What you get for it

Better fruit set on the crops that need the buzz, which shows up as fewer dropped flowers and better shaped fruit rather than as a bigger plant. If you have been fighting with tomatoes that flower well and fruit badly, this is the first thing I would look at before changing anything else.

Come and have a yak with us about which natives will handle your spot, because that is the part worth getting right and it depends on the sun and the soil you have got.

Shop related products

Brunnings Garden Compost with Seaweed 25L. For getting natives established.
Seasol Seaweed Concentrate 1L. A tonic while new plantings settle in.
Multicrop EcoPest Oil Insect Spray. When you do have to treat something, treat the plant and not the whole garden.
Martins Organic Sugar Cane Bale 11kg. Mulch for the beds, keeping a patch of bare ground aside for the bees.

Natives and flowering plants move with the season, so ask us what is on the benches in the garden centre.