The words “town dump” rarely (never?) conjure images of pretty blossoms and happy buzzing bees. But this summer, the former Pine Tree Landfill in Hampden has become the surprising setting for a garden intended to attract threatened honeybees and native bees and nourish them with tasty pollen and nectar.

In May, researchers at the University of Maine planted pollinator gardens at two sites there, one mostly flowers (aster, wild sunflowers, meadowsweet, borage, lavender hyssop….) on the capped landfill itself, the other bee-enticing shrubs at its edge.

Frank Drummond, professor of insect ecology and pollination at the University of Maine, Oreno, said the idea had often occurred to him as he drove by the old landfill as he headed in to work. The capped landfill – a big grassy mound – resembles a meadow. So perhaps it wasn’t a stretch to think bees, specifically, “It would be nice to make the landscape a little more beneficial to the biodiversity of animals in the area,” as Drummond puts it.

He mentioned that to his colleague, Alison Dibble, now the lead researcher. She wrote a grant (to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a branch of the USDA) got the grant, and reached out to Casella Waste Systems, the company that manages the old landfill.

“We were pretty excited,” said Don Meagher, Casella manager of planning and development and a former beekeeper himself. “We have to walk the landfill on a regular basis as part of our post-closure monitoring to make sure everything is as it should be. As we are doing that walkover, we are always struck by how much bee activity there is. There are a lot of flowers being visited by a lot of bees. I thought, ‘If we can do this planting and enhance it even more, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”

It will take the researchers several years to quantify “wonderful thing” in scientific terms. They assessed the bee population before the garden was installed and continue to monitor the bees. “Usually, what happens is the first year, the bees will begin to discover it,” Drummond said, “but it’s the second, third and fourth year when you tend to get large amounts of flowering and the bees can take advantage.”

And there are challenges – it turns out quackgrass and other plants are so well-established at the old landfill, it’s not easy for the bee-attracting blossoms to gain a toehold so Dibble and her colleagues have had to do some of that most dreaded gardening chore – weeding. Nonetheless, some 400 old town dumps exist in Maine. Imagine, as Drummond and Meagher have, if all were transformed by gardeners into bee buffets. With human cross-pollination of a neat idea, perhaps the demonstration pollinator garden at the old Pine Tree Landfill can serve as a model.