From what I understand, although Australia has a large number of native bee species, our main pollinators were birds, which is why we have so many flowering frees with ‘robust’ flowers.

In our (inner city) garden we have at least 3 hives, all naturally occurring. Two are euro bees and 1 is natives. There’s at least 1 other native hive in the garden or nearby - we see a lot of blue banded native bees on some flowers.

I really like your thinking, but I’ve become much less convinced about the natives only in the cities. A lot of natives are really well adapted to cities, and the ones that do well don’t necessarily create the right environments for critters.

As an example all our hives live exclusively in camphor laurels. I think it’s because that the camphor’s have a lot of good hollows and they create a lot of shade. Bees don’t like it too hot and they need protected places to build hives. I don’t suggest that you go around trying to plant camphor’s because they are a real invasive species, but they’re definitely good for critters and a really hardy and fast growing, and suit suburbs well. There’s probably are more suitable alternative (ours are very old), but most suburbs are so devoid of significant trees that something has to be better than nothing.

We’ve got a mix of natives and introduced plants here, which all flower at different times. I think this means that there much more certainly and diversity of pollen for the bees. For example the early spring all the rodedendrums were out, wattles were flowering a few months ago, and then the jasmin start and has just finished. The bees bloody love the jasmin. The calistamons are about to go off now, and then all the other summer flowers will take over.

I like the idea of turning vacant land into something useful, but there’s also so much we can do with our own gardens that create permanent habitat that isn’t just grass. We’re part of a strata in a major city, so if we can do it I’d encourage everyone to give it a go themselves.