Prunella vulgaris, Bombus
Sarah Red-Laird
Bee Habitat in Cyanotype 14
Trisaetum’s Coast Range Vineyard // McMinville, Oregon
Prunella vulgaris, Self Heal
Bombus, Bumble Bee
Cyanotype, Goldleaf Paint, BGO Entomological Collection, Barnwood
Collected Summer 2021
Composed 2023
Trisaetum Winery and BGO have been collaborating through the “Bee Friendly Vineyards” program since 2019. This is a vintner and melittologist-driven collaboration led by Trisaetum’s James Frey and BGO’s Sarah Red-Laird.
Together they are letting data collected from the vineyard’s soil, grapes, bees, flowers, and microbiology inform management decisions. They believe that a vineyard can concurrently produce stellar fruit and create an ecological refugia for some of our most important (and imperiled) pollinators – the bees.
Our collaboration has resulted in decreasing chemical inputs and increasing wildflowers through planting seeds along fencerows and headlands and reducing, or eliminating, mowing and tillage in and around the vineyards.
Because grapes are self-pollinating, vineyard managers often don’t consider creating pollinator-friendly landscapes. However, bees have an important and undervalued role outside of cash crop pollination services. They are also essential in building soil health, though ensuring the reproduction of plants that fix nitrogen naturally and support healthy mycorrhiza communities, essential in grapevine production.
Bees are an indicator species of a healthy vineyard and an in-tact environment. Ecologically speaking, a healthy community of bees is an indication of the life-cycle loop coming back together.
Learn more about the winery here, and make sure to visit for a tasting on your next trip to Oregon’s Willamette Valley wine country!
One of our favorite surprises of our Bee Friendly Vineyards collaboration is Prunella vulgaris, aka self-heal.
For the last decade, or so, the hillsides around the Coast Range vineyard, near McMinnville, were mowed to nubbins. In 2021 year, the crew transitioned from mowing to watering our bee habitat plots, an essential task during the drought.
Where there once was stubble, is now a wildflower meadow of daisies, clover, flatweed, glandweed, poison oak (a popular native flower!!), and self-heal abuzz with bees and other beneficials like ladybugs and butterflies.
Self-heal is a nectar source for bees as small as little sweat bees, aka Lasioglossum, and as big as queen Bombus, aka bumble bees. It's also a larval host for the Clouded sulphur butterfly.
It's a perennial herb native in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.
The Nlaka'pamux (Thompson River Salish people) use the whole plant to make a healing tea.
From the CommonWealth Center for Holistic Herbalism 🌱
"Self Heal, Prunella vulgaris, is one of those plants that seems able to do everything. Writing in the 16th century, Gerard said that no herb equals Self Heal for healing wounds, and a whole host of other things. Self Heal is used all over the world – by Native Americans, Europeans, and all across Asia, for things as varied as thyroid problems to conjunctivitis to tuberculosis to arthritis to cancer. Which sounds absurd, or at least exaggerated, right? Except, Self Heal is one of the more widely studied herbs and even in scientific studies, you see these broad lists of conditions where Self Heal has been helpful – as an anti-inflammatory painkiller, for gingivitis, for osteoarthritis, HIV, herpes, diabetes, high blood pressure, even tuberculosis, liver cancer, and endometriosis! And to top it all off, amnesia and dementia?? What is going on? When even scientific studies come back with such a wide range of seemingly unrelated issues, clearly there’s something amazing about this plant!"
Now that you know that there is so much more to this plant than beauty and bee food, consider harvesting some next year and enjoy it in a spring salad! Check out this article from Mother Earth Living to learn more about this plant, and how to grow it on your own farm or backyard.