Nick,
COngrads on your new gardens!
I am sooo jealous!
Why do you want to plant wildflowers?
Your orchard willl be fine, you don't need wildflowers around them to attract bees. By the way, there have been problems with lack of bees for polination due to pesticides.
The bees will definately come when they smell fruit.
If you want to plant wild flowers just to have them, just plant them then.
Wild flowers look nice by themselves, as if they came up by themselves. in their own space.
Good luck with your new gardens!
Post a pic next year when everything starts to grow in, we would love to see it.

I would like to plant the wildflowers just to have them, but beyond attracting extra beeds, I'd also like to attract beneficial insects to help keep the pests in place. I plan to spray my apples in the spring (against spots and such), but I am not big on spraying my plants against pests. I like encourage the good guys to kill the bad ones.
Another reason for wanting it is to turn an area to naturalized flowers, and one less place to mow :o)

Nick, Congratulations on your new place and your plans for this coming year! I just got into butterflies in late summer of 2005 and absolutely love wildflowers. I never tried any mix and have been gradually building up my garden over the past several years. The thing that I find to big the biggest honeybee and bumblebee attractant in my garden is Anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum). On just about any day I could go outside and see hundreds of honeybees gathering nectar from the anise flowers. The leaves have a heavenly scent and I just love the plants. I've read that honeybees are having problems so I want to help them out and hope that my pesticide-free garden will be a haven for bees and butterflies.

One of my passions is Monarch butterflies, so I have a couple hundred milkweed plants outside and have raised a little over 500 this year. I have also planted other nectar and host plants for various types of butterflies, some of which I already have and some that I hope to be able to attract here someday. Not only do the butterflies go to the milkweed but so do bees. Other good wildflowers to plant would be purple coneflowers, Joe Pyeweed, blazing star liatris, ironweed, black-eyes susans...there are just so many wildflowers to choose from. I'm still reading about wildflowers and trying to decide which ones I want to plant yet. It's really fun looking at pictures of them online. A good place to get wildflower seeds from is Prairie Moon Nursery. Best of luck with your venture.

Nick don't buy seeds if you send me a self addressed stamped bubble envelope I will send tons of seeds for native plants to you.
Patty