What Are Pollinators and Why Should You Care?

For obvious reasons, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. On the outskirts of a city such as Chicago or St. Louis, you might see a sprawling grassy field alive with flies, bees and dragonflies, not to mention birds and mammals.

On the other hand, many people who live in urban centers will see nothing but brick walls opposite, with maybe an external A/C unit to lend a little interest.

If you’re lucky and work in the Loop or live across from a concerned citizen, you might gaze across at a green roof – or even look out upon your own.

This question matters not because a great view is, well, great (although that counts for a lot too), but because what you see correlates directly with the happiness of your neighborhood pollinators.

Green space = happy bugs, birds and critters. Barren surfaces = not.

Sure, this subject might not seem like the most crucial in the world – not with bills to pay and projects to finish and social initiatives to launch – but it’s far more important than you might think.

If you don’t truly understand who our pollinators are and why you should care, it’s time to change that today. Only then can we protect the diversity of pollinators within our cities and outside their borders.

Yet if someone asked you to point to a pollinator, we’re betting your finger would automatically gravitate toward a single type of insect: the bee. Especially those black and gold stripy critters that frequent our berry bushes and herb plants.

The bee, however, is far from the only animal that provides these crucial services. We rely on a wealth of other organisms to get pollen from A to B (i.e. from plant to plant), and without those animals, we would live a much poorer life here on Earth.

Much.

We cannot overstate this: We need the pollinators. Quite apart from our sacred duty to respect and steward all life on Earth (yes, we said sacred), we humans just straight-up gotta have these guys around if we want to eat more than algae in the coming centuries. Which we do, personally.

So while the honored honeybee can retain its position in the pollinator pantheon, it’s time we looked farther afield to solve the crisis facing our world today.

Let’s talk about the pollinators.

Today we’re going to talk about what they are, what they do and why you should care. Use the table of contents below to jump straight to the subjects that interest you, OR download the full free report instead.

This basic process defines our daily lives, even in the modern, urban world. Yet many of us don’t think about – or don’t even understand – what pollination is. (Don’t worry – we’ve had to do our research over the years too.) Ready to get educated? Read on.

First, let’s start with a basic definition of this form of plant reproduction.

This is a bigger question than you might think, embracing as it does evolution, biology and even sex. Yay, plant sex! It’s a thing.

Pollen – the root of the word “pollination” and Latin for “fine flour” – is a powdery substance produced by plants containing the male genetic material. In other words, plant sperm. Yay, plant sperm! It’s also a thing.

Okay, sorry. We’re done with that.

Note that not all plants use pollen. Of the four plant groups, neither bryophytes (mosses) nor pteridophytes (ferns and horsetails) employ it for fertilization. Instead, they use free-swimming sperm, water permitting, to fertilize female structures. This fertilization process produces a spore, a more primitive structure that performs roughly the same role as a seed. If you enjoy boring people at cocktail parties, you can read up on this in the sources. (1)

The other two groups of plants do use pollen for reproduction: gymnosperms (conifers, cycads and the gingko, among others) and angiosperms (flowering plants).

The word gymnosperm is Greek for “naked seed,” due to the fact that seeds are not housed in fruits or other bodies. Gymnosperms reproduce through cones, usually differentiated male and female cones, the former of which produces pollen and the latter ovules. Wind, water or pollinators moves the one to the other to produce a seed, which will germinate in contact with the right soil and moisture conditions.

The process is similar in flowering plants. Grains of pollen originate on the stamen, or male flower structures, which are topped with pollen-rich anthers. These need to get to the female structure, or pistil, of the flower. Some flowers self-germinate, while others are carried to neighboring blooms or plants – again by wind or pollinators.

It perhaps goes without saying that plants, much like animals, can only breed within their own species. While there are closely related species that make an exception (examples from the animal world include donkeys and ligers, though these are almost exclusively created through human intervention), it’s definitely not the rule.

That said, some plants can breed with themselves, given that there are male and female structures on the same organism. This is possible when the pollen from a plant fertilizes an ovule from that same plant.

Most plants benefit from breeding with other plants, though. A wider reproductive scope means more genetic variety and a healthier population. As we’ve discussed before, plant diversity is critical to the survival and vitality of a species.

The idea is pretty simple: The bigger a species’ gene pool, the less likely it is that any one hardship will wipe out that species, even if it does impact a significant number of the population. Plants, for instance, are in danger from infection, insect predation and harsh weather. If these factors are strong enough, many plants in a population will die. With enough genetic variety, however, you will almost always have some with a natural immunity to a disease, with a characteristics to which insects are averse, or with the ability to withstand greater cold, heat or drought.

Consequently, we can’t have plants only breeding with themselves. Genetic variety quickly dwindles, putting them at risk. (And us at the same time. Just BTW.)

That’s where pollinators come in.

What Are Pollinators?

Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the last decade – and a very remote rock at that – you’ve probably heard the world “pollinator.” But what exactly is it?

At the most basic level, a pollinator is an animal that ferries pollen from one plant to another.

They don’t do this out of the goodness of their tiny hearts, of course, but rather because they get a reward for doing so. Although who knows, maybe some of them DO enjoy that feeling of helping the Earth. We can’t say.

Usually that reward is in the form of nectar, but a number of insects and mites (members of the arachnid family) also collect pollen to eat it. Some of them munch on the pollen whole, while others drink the liquid out of it and leave the solids behind. Any animal that eats pollen is known as a palynivore. (Honeybees actually make honey from nectar, not pollen, FYI. Just a little mythbuster to enliven your day.)

Birds do not collect pollen to eat it, rather drinking the nectar and moving the pollen unintentionally from flower to flower as they move around. Similarly, invertebrates collecting pollen for consumption will invariably leave some behind, pollinating as they go.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Eating makes the world go round. Usually when we say that, we’re referring to donuts. But the point stands.

A pollinator, therefore, is any animal that moves pollen from plant to plant, fertilizing it. Believe it or not, there are hundreds of thousands of pollinators in the world – about 200,000. Not animals, but full-blown species. That’s a lot of animals on which our world and our civilization rely.

Mind blown, right?

Of those, only about a thousand of vertebrates – birds, bats or mammals. The rest are invertebrates, which we will discuss in the following section. The most obvious of these are bees – specifically the honeybee – but as we shall see, they are not nearly the whole story.

Sadly, because the vast majority of pollinators are insects, they often get a bad rap. As anyone who has ever turned on their A/C in summer only to get a full blast of bees in the face can tell you (yes, that’s happened to one us), it’s tempting to see them as the enemy.

But they’re not. Like any enemy, we need to understand them if we want to undermine this insidious myth.

So who exactly are the pollinators? Let’s take a look.

What Types of Animals Are Pollinators?

Most people with an inkling about pollinators associate the word with bees, especially the famous honeybee. But it goes far beyond that.

There are, of course, reasons the honeybee holds such a preeminent position in our society. Not only are they a popular visual motif, they’re spoken of in old stories and poetry, and they’ve gotten a lot of coverage in the news due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

In a nutshell, this is an inexplicable decline in hive populations over a short period of time. Adult bees disappear, leaving behind no bodies, a queen and many young bees – along with a viable food supply that fails to explain their disappearance. (2)

While researchers have no firm conclusion about what causes CCD, they theorize it may be related to:

• Varroa mites

• Other pests and diseases

• Agricultural and landscape chemicals

• Habitat changes and destruction

• Reduction in food supply

Stress from transportation of colonies over large distances to serve farming needs

Focusing too much on this issue, however, puts us at risk of underestimating the importance of most other pollinator species. Indeed, there is evidence that wild pollinators may be even more important to the success of plants and crops than honeybees, which we will discuss in the next section.

It’s also easy to draw the conclusion that since honeybees are doing so poorly, they’re the only ones in trouble, but that’s not the case. Many scientists cite an insect apocalypse, in which numbers and species are declining at worrisome rates all across the world.

For that reason, we need to get educated about who the pollinators are overall, so that we can protect all of them.

You might be astonished to know the pollinating crowd includes:

Bees

Okay, so we didn’t start with the most astonishing pollinator around.

Still ... move over, honeybees! This extremely broad category includes bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees and blueberry bees, among countless others. There are more than 4,000 species of native bee in the United States alone, says the U.S. Forest Service. (3) Other estimates put the number as high as 5,000.

Most of these are solitary, living and nesting alone, coming together only to mate. There are also several kinds of “eusocial” bee, which live in large, cooperative colonies. These include honeybees (duh), bumblebees and stingless bees, a species largely found in tropical and subtropical regions.

For the most part, the bees we care about are the ones native to our particular region. For us, it’s the Midwest ... for you, it might be different. These are the species on which native plants rely, and believe it or not, they do a great job pollinating our crops too. More on that below!

Wasps

No one likes the word “wasp.” We get it. They’re scary-looking and they’re certainly scary-feeling when they sting you. (Ask anyone.) But wasps are not the enemy. Not only are some of them stingless, but few people have been stung more than once – if at all.

Meanwhile, while they’re busy doing all that not-stinging, wasps are also busy pollinating our plants. They belong to the same family as bees (Hymenoptera), so they have many of the same feeding habits. While they’re not quite as efficient as bees due to their relative hairlessness, they do still feed on nectar and pollen, and so move the latter from place to place. (4)

Phew! We made it through wasps. *wipes brow* Let’s move on to a much cuter group.

Butterflies and Moths

Everyone loves butterflies and moths! Whether you’re an early bird or a night owl, the spring through fall months offer much to see from the Lepidoptera family, morning and night. Makes sense, since there are a lot of these guys around – estimates vary, but range from 150,000 to 300,000. If the latter is true, they comprise about 3 percent of the total number of described organisms here on Earth.

It is difficult to find numbers on how many of these pollinate plants, but it’s quite a percentage. Like bees and wasps, moths and butterflies feed on flower products. They move from plant to plant, using long feeding tubes to suck up nectar. Moths, typically nocturnal, feed and fly at night, which is why it’s so important to be aware of our nocturnal activities.

Dragonflies

Some claim dragonflies pollinate as well, though others say that’s only because they prey on many of the animals that truly do pollinate as a way of life – bees, wasps, and so forth. There is evidence that this might be a net loss for the pollination effort, though, since they’re reducing the pollinator population.

One study indicates that fish may help control dragonfly populations, and therefore indirectly boost pollinators. This is localized to the area of the study (Florida), so we can’t draw any widespread conclusions about it – but it does go to show that an ecosystem is more than the sum of its parts, and the activities of each species have ripple effects beyond what you might think. (5)

As for dragonflies, we suppose the jury is out.

Flies

Like wasps, flies are not as hairy as bees, and therefore are not as good at carrying pollen from flower to flower. Despite their reduced efficiency, there are a significant number of flies that do play important roles in pollination. (No, the housefly is not one of them, so you can keep swatting with abandon.)

“Some flies, such as syrphids, masquerade as bees and wasps,” says the U.S. Forest Service. “However, the pollinating flies can be distinguished with a sharp eye. The flies have only one pair of wings while bees and wasps have two pairs of wings.” (6)

True to seemingly all of flydom, many of them love the nastier flowers – skunk cabbage and red trillium (which purportedly smells like rotting flesh) among them. Um, thanks for keeping these going, flies?

Beetles

Beetles are one of the most varied animal groups on the planet. Coleoptera (beetles and weevils) is the biggest member of the insect class, itself part of the most populous phylum in the animal kingdom (Arthropoda). There are, in other words, a whole grip of beetles, many of which perform pollination services.

Despite their unkempt approach to pollination (they like to chew right through petals and poo in flowers, unlike the much cleaner bees and other flying insects), beetles are very important pollinators. In fact, says the Forest Service, they were vital to the pollination of the very earliest angiosperms, doing their thing in the Mesozoic (200 million years ago) just as well as today. (7)

Ants

Not nearly as important to the pollination effort as bees and beetles, a few species of ants do nevertheless visit flowers to collect nectar, and in so doing, pollinate plants. However, ants are just as likely to be destructive as helpful, and in any case, most that visit flowers probably still don’t do much. *shrug* Just thought we’d tell you about them anyway.

Birds

Now birds, on the other hand, are a different story.

Like wasps, birds may visit flowers to feed on insects as well as on nectar. Because of their feathers, capable of picking up a lot of pollen, they are among the more effective pollinators. According to some studies, they are capable of depositing substantially more pollen than bees. (8) The beautiful flitting hummingbird is the best-known example in our neck of the woods, where native species are critical to the survival of any number of Midwestern natives.

Less well-known (to us Americans, anyway) are parrots! Turns out these bad boys transfer a lot of pollen on their beaks and heads while doing their daily rounds. For many plants, parrots are even more critical than insects. In addition to parrots, “spiderhunters, sunbirds, honeycreepers and honeyeaters” are the most common. Interestingly, birds have little sense of smell but very acute vision, so they love plants with bright flowers. (9)

Mammals

Fuzzy mammals! Yes, they pollinate too. Like birds and their feathers, the fur of mammals allows them to pick up lots of pollen on their way from plant to plant collecting nectar or insects. Feeding on pollen is the exception rather than the rule with mammals, but there is at least one species that does it. (10)

Among the most common mammal species are genets, mongoose and sengis (a type of shrew with a long, needle-like nose ... every bit as adorable as you would think).

Also, bats! When they’re not busy coalescing into Dracula, bats fly around at night feeding on insects, nectar and fruit. These nocturnal pollinators are critical in the production of many plants we enjoy, such as mango, banana, cocoa, durian, guava and agave (hello, tequila!) – in addition to about 500 other species. (11)

So if you like your chocolate and tequila, thank the bats.

Oh, and let’s not forget lemurs. Lemurs pollinate as well, and are probably the cutest animals to do it. But that’s just, like, our opinion, man. (Gold star to anyone who can identify that reference. Email us and we will give you a digital high five.)

Reptiles

“In reptiles, around 40 lizard species are known pollinators, including skinks, geckos and wall lizards,” BBC Earth says. “This type of pollination is usually associated with island ecosystems, where resident reptiles tend to include nectar and fruit as part of their diets.” (12)

It’s also worth noting that some species commonly viewed as enemies, such as thrips, may actually play a vital role in pollinating certain plants. (13) For that reason, it’s important that we actually understand the insects we kill, and only eliminate those that truly damage plants and threaten our food supply, rather than simply eradicating any organism traditionally seen as a nuisance.

This is not a complete list of pollinators, but hopefully by now you see that honeybees are far from the only species that does the job. That said, let’s turn our attention to one of the most important roles they play in our world – at least, from the Homo sapiens point of view:

Pollinating our crops.

How Do Pollinators Impact Our Food Supply?

Anyone who has walked through an apple orchard in spring or a field of squash in summer already knows that the pollinators are active participants in the life cycles of our crops.

According to the National Resources Conservation Service, “Animals pollinate approximately 75 percent of the crop plants grown worldwide for food, fiber, beverages, condiments, spices, and medicines. It has been calculated that one out of every three to four mouthfuls of food we eat and beverages we drink is delivered to us by pollinators.” (14)

This is just one estimate. According to others, they are responsible for anything from 30 to 90 percent of our food production, depending on whom you believe. Most cereal crops, many fruits and the majority of veggies depend on at least some pollinator action.

Others, like almonds, would be gone in a generation without the bees who move from bloom to bloom in springtime. (And we all know what that means: No marzipan. Aunt Shirley will not be pleased this Christmas.)

Plus, pollination of grasses helps to feed our animals, resulting in products many of us consume every day, such as meat, dairy and eggs.

An Economic Problem

They matter to the economy, too. According to the White House Archives from the Obama Administration, “Pollinators contribute more than 24 billion dollars to the United States economy, of which honey bees [sic] account for more than 15 billion dollars.” (15) Keep in mind, those numbers are from several years ago.

These numbers prove three things:

• That we really, really, really need pollinators to stay healthy and numerous

• That wild pollinators represent more than a third of the economic value of pollinators

• That given their fragility and unreliability due to CCD, we can no longer rely on honeybees to carry such weight in the pollination equation

The White House report adds that “Globally, 87 of the leading 115 food crops evaluated are dependent on animal pollinators, contributing 35% of global food production.” In other words, this isn’t an America problem; it’s an Earth problem.

Put that way, it’s a little bit terrifying to think of anything happening to pollinators, isn’t it? The good news is, as discussed above, there exists such a vast array of pollinating species in the world that the extinction of one, as devastating as that might prove, can’t actually kill us. Even if honeybees disappeared tomorrow, we could rebound – perhaps more effectively than we might think.

You can relax, though: That’s not going to happen. CCD leads to overwintering population declines of around 30 percent, as opposed to 10 or 15 percent historically. That’s a big deal, but it doesn’t indicate that honeybees are going to up and croak tomorrow.

An Irreplaceable Service

Yet pollinators provide services that humans simply can’t mimic by hand or with machines. While it is possible to hand-pollinate, that approach is more appropriate to the hobby Meyer lemon tree in your greenhouse. It’s not going to work for 100 acres of pumpkin, for obvious reasons. Accordingly, we must protect pollinators at all costs.

Mind you, that’s true before we take all their ecosystem services into account.

What Role Do Pollinators Play in Our Ecosystems?

Pollinators have played an integral part of life on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Dismissing their importance to humanity would be like dismissing water purity; just don’t do it.

We realize that many people do lose interest in the pollinator debate after covering the food part. The environment, they figure, can fend for itself.

Sigh. This takes a little unpacking.

First, there’s the claim that environmentalists are snooty pie-in-the-sky thinkers from affluent backgrounds, people with the luxury to worry about the birds and the bees. (No, not in that way. Get your mind out of the gutter.) This accusation is often leveled by people who feel that ecologists are quick to dismiss the economic payoffs of leasing land to coal or natural gas mining, for example, or of farming a monoculture crop. And they’re not wrong; many environmentalists are unsympathetic to the needs of people suffering financial burdens.

Second, we often see the related claim that while green thinkers want people to think long-term, they offer no short-term benefits to bridge the gap. Long-term thinking, as history has proven again and again, is the purview of the privileged.

That’s why we here at Ecogardens work hard to acknowledge the economic side of the equation, whether that means stormwater management, green infrastructure or the food economy. Long-term studies do show that, even if the short-term benefits are vague, that green thinking is the cheaper choice overall.

Wherever you land on this debate, it is absolutely critical that we at least understand the role that pollinators play in our ecosystem. Only then can we truly appreciate what might happen if we were to lose them.

Pollinators Create Healthy Ecologies

Our environment would not be the same – AT ALL – without pollinators. Sorry for the all caps, but it’s true. Bees, flies and other pollinators help create healthy forests, grasslands and even deserts, as well as all the other biomes.

Often a species specializes in pollinating a certain plant, without which that plant species would risk extinction. They also help with reproduction of the organisms on which wildlife survives, such as the flowers from which birds drink or the oak trees from which squirrels gather nuts.

They perpetuate the many grasses and shrubs that deer chomp on, which in turn helps prey species grow fat and nourishing to wide-ranging apex predators, such as wolves and grizzlies.

In other words, pollinators are one of the most critical classes of animals on the planet, laying the foundation for healthy ecologies from urban to rural, cold to hot, wet to dry and everything in between.

According to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, a solid three-quarters of the world’s flowering plants depend on them. (16) Our wild areas obviously would never be the same without them. Nor, we might add, would our urban spaces.

Pollinators Promote Healthy Cities

Here at Ecogardens, we believe they also keep our cities healthier. By pollinating trees, wildflowers, plants in gardens and parks, and more, they provide us with a cleaner environment. That’s because plants:

• Draw carbon out of the air and fix it in the ground

• Suck up toxins and pollutants from stormwater

• Clean chemicals and smog out of the air so that we don’t breathe them in

• Keep cities cooler through evapotranspiration

• Provide natural views and environments, which are psychologically soothing and restful

• Harbor beneficial insects

… and generally make home a more pleasant place to “bee.” (Sorry. We couldn’t resist.)

Without pollinators, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to perpetuate the native species that other animals – birds, mammals, beneficial insects – need to thrive. And our dream of blending urban and natural would suffer greatly.

This is especially true of our wild friends.

Why Should We Pay More Attention to Wild Pollinators?

Wild pollinators don’t get a lot of love, mostly because of the homage paid to the honeybee. But new research shows they may be far more important in many (if not most) ways.

Ready to have your mind boggled? Great.

There exist between 4,000 and 5,000 species of bee native to the United States alone. That doesn’t include bees around the world. It doesn’t include other types of insect pollinators. It doesn’t include non-insect animals.

That is a lot of pollinators, the vast majority of them wild.

First, a definition. You already know that a pollinator is an animal that distributes pollen among different flowers and plants, aiding in its reproduction unintentionally while collecting food.

A wild pollinator, therefore, is any animal that does this in the wild. What? Crazy! But true.

We must add the caveat that though this makes it sound as though there exists a large group of domesticated pollinators, in fact the only true domesticated pollinator species is the honeybee. Increasingly, concerned citizens are creating habitat for other types of bees – mason bees is a good example – but this is still far less common than the honeybee hives humans have kept since ancient times.

Unfortunately, our favoritism harms wild pollinators.

As one study explains, “honeybees might negatively affect native pollinator populations, bumblebees in particular.” It goes on to observe that “Bumblebees were excluded from the raspberry field by means of exploitative competition from honeybees ( > 97 percent of flower visits in the raspberry fields were conducted by honeybees). More than 55% of the visits recorded in wild plant communities surrounding the farms were conducted by bumblebees, showing that bumblebees were present in the system.” (17)

That’s a big drop. More than 42 percent more of the pollination services are conducted by honeybees in areas where they are present, even though clearly native wild bees are very efficient pollinators – and much more prevalent in the surrounding areas. That’s a job they could be doing, were they given the space.

The problem is, by increasing cultivated land and then bringing honeybees into that land, we deplete wild bee environment. This has a cascade of serious consequences:

• Fewer bees, fewer pollinators to cultivate the native plants that honeybees don’t care about

• Fewer native plants pollinated, fewer surviving, fewer to feed the animals that depend on those plants – including native bees

• A weaker food web, weaker ecosystem, weaker environment

• A less stable world

Plus, many native plants evolved to serve only one species of wild pollinator, and vice versa. Without their partner animal, those plants will go extinct. Conversely, without their preferred plant, that pollinator species might disappear too.

It’s not a pretty picture, which means we must start paying attention to wild pollinators.

Wild Pollinators: The More Efficient Choice?

Setting aside the environmental concerns for a moment, research shows that many wild pollinators are better at pollination than honeybees, at least when it comes to certain crops – fruit, seed, nut and coffee products among them. (18)

Moreover, wild pollinators know things about native plants that honeybees do not, such as bumblebees, which are able to “buzz pollinate” many flowers, vibrating at a specific frequency that releases pollen from the bloom’s anther. Radical, right? Honeybees haven’t evolved to do this, so even if they do visit a flower, they pick up far less pollen.

Boo! We want pollen! We want pollen! (Can you picture our waving signs? They totally have bubble letter print.)

Ahem.

One illustrative study found that bumblebees are roughly twice as efficient at pollinating pumpkins than either honeybees or squash bees. Being fat, fuzzy and ponderous, they pick up more pollen and bump along, leaving more behind in their wake. (19)

See? We knew there had to be a benefit to clumsiness somewhere in the animal kingdom. We’ve found it!

What with Colony Collapse Disorder causing one giant cultural ulcer, and wild pollinators desperately in need of homes, why wouldn’t we support efficient and adorable species like native bumblebees more?

The truth is, humans take it for granted that bees and other buzzing bugs will appear like clockwork once spring hits and the weather warms up. But if we don’t give those pollinators somewhere to live, feed and breed, they will suffer more and more.

How Can We Support Wild Pollinators?

This is a question we will discuss in greater detail below. For now, suffice it to say that there are several steps we can take:

• Cut agricultural honeybee rentals down (though we don’t have to eliminate them) to give wild bees more potential food sources

• Grow wild pollinator food sources in strips between fields, reducing the total size of uninterrupted monocultured plots, to encourage more wild pollinators to venture deeper into fields

• Keep studying and talking about their benefits

Note: It is important that we do not fall into the same trap that we have with honeybees, where we begin to raise and manage populations of wild bee commercially. Domesticating a species always leads to problems with disease, species stress and transportation (fossil fuel use, hello). Also, it perpetuates the problem of invasive species, which is exactly what we’re dealing with when it comes to honeybees.

Instead, what we need to do is create more habitat for local species so that their numbers can grow organically. That means understanding the risks they face right now. We’ve discussed some of these already, but let’s take a deeper dive now.

What Risks Do Pollinators Face Today?

The risks facing pollinators are daunting. Not to fearmonger, but we are truly talking destruction from every quarter. Doing something about that requires looking those risks in the face.

As the PennState College of Agricultural Sciences reports, “surveys have documented disturbing population declines and even local extinctions of select pollinator species across Europe and the US.” (20)

Unfortunately, adds the college, “Population changes in other insect pollinator species [not honeybees], such as other bee species, flies, butterflies and beetles have not been as closely tracked. Indeed, there are several hundred thousand species of pollinators and tracking all of them is not possible.”

We may never know how many pollinators we’re losing day to day, year to year. But we do know that the odds are stacked against them, and the more the human population grows, the more unstable their situation becomes.

The Pollinator Reality: Destruction from Every Quarter

While an exhaustive report on the dangers facing pollinators is beyond the scope of this article, they do face some paramount issues:

1. We have decimated their former habitats. By paving over green spaces, we take away food and shelter, and we don’t put anything in their place. Urban spaces are covered in dead zones: cement and concrete, asphalt and brick, even lawns – which, chopped down before grasses can bloom, is meaningless greenery.

2. Our use of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and other chemicals to preserve our outdated monocultural approach crops and landscaping is also a problem – both inside city limits and in our agricultural spaces.

3. Stormwater also has an impact. With old sewer systems that routinely back up and overflow, we face chemicals and disease flowing into waterways every rainy season. This harms wildlife, quite literally poisoning the well, and that includes pollinators.

4. We actively destroy many species of pollinators, from wasps to flies to bees, out of fear and mistrust and failed education. Even when we don’t, we’re mowing down the native environments on which many pollinators depend and replacing them with impermeable surfaces, useless exotic gardens or lawns, and toxic trash heaps.

The problem, as you can see, is a huge one. But it is not insurmountable.

How Can We Decrease the Risks to Pollinators?

Protecting pollinators requires a two-pronged approach.

First, we need to stop the activities and lifestyles that harm them. If we can transform damaging human practices into holistic ones, we will have much less “fixing” to do in future.

Second, we need to start instituting pollinator-friendly practices on a widespread scale, now. Today. Actually, yesterday.

Let’s start with what to stop.

Stop Limiting Your Idea of “Pollinator”

As we have already discussed, the simplistic images of pollinators held by most Americans – and others around the world – are problematic. Not is the pollinator=honeybee equation limited in the extreme, it lends the impression that all bees are social creatures.

In fact, most bees are actually solitary. That means aside from mating, they live, eat and sleep alone. (And not in a sad way. They’re making a choice, okay??)

Because we fail to recognize the importance of native solitary bees, we don’t do much to accommodate their habitats (many of which are in steady decline). If we want to keep enjoying, you know, food … then that needs to change.

Where Possible, Stop Killing Insects

Now, we understand that people don’t like insects. At the heart of it is a deeply culturally ingrained fear of getting bitten, stung, infected or turned into a superhero. (Fine, so that only happened once. And it’s probably not real. Still.)

We accept this. Truthfully, there are insect species that Ecogardens eradicates in the green systems we manage, either because they are detrimental to the plants in the system or because they might cause harm to humans. We’re talking fire ants here, not any bee that looks vaguely like it might one day become a nuisance.

It’s impossible to stress enough that the generalization of a few harmful species to a whole class of animals is a serious problem. When we kill flies that look like bees, harmless stingless bees, bee nests far from human habitats, and so forth, we eliminate pollinators when we didn’t really need to. When, in fact, we desperately need not to.

Our plea: Make sure insects are really causing true harm and that you have no other choice before eradicating them.

Use Fewer Pesticides and Herbicides

Hand-pulling weeds and integrated pest management (IPM) are much better approaches to controlling weeds and truly unwanted insects, such as aphids and fire ants, than herbicides and pesticides.

According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, “IPM is a decision-making process that coordinates pest biology, site management goals, environmental conditions, consensus building, tools, technology and methods to prevent unacceptable levels of pest damage while minimizing risk to people, property, and the environment, including pollinators.” (21)

IPM is the best way to minimize pests without killing pollinators or creating pesticide-resistant pests, which could prove truly catastrophic in the long run.

This is especially important around nesting sites, such as wood piles, tall grasses, yard debris, and other collections of woody or leafy materials. Bees and insects like to live and overwinter here, and if you’re spraying them, you’re killing them.

Reduce Monoculture Cropping

Monoculture cropping is a devastating human activity. Planting innumerable acres with a single, closely spaced species creates a whole lotta problems. Disease is rampant, insects feast on all that carefully tended food, and blights or weather events that will kill one plant will often kill them all. It’s not a sustainable method of growing food – at least not as we practice it right now.

Worse, it requires huge amounts of herbicide, fungicide and pesticide to control all the weeds, fungi, diseases and plants that spring up in proximity to monoculture. We. Need. To. Stop.

This is obviously too towering a problem to tackle in one report, but we will discuss some ways we can soften the impact that monoculture has on our pollinators below.

Most people don’t know that monocultures also pop up in cities, in the forms of trees and other landscape plants. Lawns, moreover, are one of the most insidious monocultures there is ... swath upon endless swath of lush, green desert. #nothankyou

Leave Litter Intact

One of the best things you can do for pollinators is just to be lazier in the yard. No, really.

Coming back to those wood piles, tall grasses, yard debris, and other collections of woody or leafy materials, beneficial insects and pollinators use these well into the spring. Many people get a hankerin’ to clean up the yard in February or March, in preparation for the growing season. But if daytime temps are not consistently above 50 degrees and you remove habitat, the insects using it will likely die.

Luckily, inherent in the problem is the solution: Simply wait until the thermometer rises to cut down ornamental grasses, rake up leaf litter, pick up sticks and otherwise clean up the place.

Stop Paving Over Spaces Unnecessarily

Many homes, businesses, public spaces and even parks contain unnecessarily large paved areas. While some areas do require paving – parking lots and driveways, for instance – many others don’t. Side yards, sidewalk strips and patios can be managed with permeable pavers that allow plants to grow through. You can also simply put down stepable plants, which can handle human foot traffic without dying – much like a lawn, but with blooms that feed pollinators.

Like most of our lists, this one is not exhaustive, but these steps will move us squarely in the direction of helping our animal friends survive tomorrow, and next year, and all the years after that. Once we change our wicked ways, though, we have to start making up for the damage done.

So ... what can we do to help pollinators? Let’s find out.

What Can We Do to Help Pollinators?

Through the efforts of many amazing people around the world, the importance of pollination and pollinators is slowly getting the attention it deserves. But we need to do more.

Pollinators rely on us to protect their environments, foster the plants on which they feed and replace the habitat they’ve lost to our activities. It’s up to us to ensure that they not only rebound from human-caused environmental degradation, but thrive in their new homes – both within and outside of cities.

One of the best steps we can take is to shrink the amount of dead space between pollinator-friendly habitats. That means planting wildflowers instead of barren lawns, covering rooftops with useful greenery, and protecting parkland and small undeveloped niches of cities. Moreover, we should do all of it without the use of chemicals.

If we want healthy urban ecologies, healthy wild areas and healthy people, we need to take steps in defense of the birds and the bees. More than anything else, pollinators need a) food and b) green space in which to rest and build homes. But they can’t furnish those elements themselves.

That means we need to take several steps.

Substitute Flowering Plants for Lawn Grasses

As we’ve discussed, lawns are pollinator deserts. Beetles, flies, bees and butterflies have absolutely no use for waving blades of green. Subbing in nectar- and pollen-rich species in favor of lawn grasses, which provide neither nutrition nor habitat, is an excellent first step.

This isn’t directed solely at the home gardener, either. We’re talking to everyone, including:

• Schools

• Commercial buildings

• Government buildings

• Public parks

• Restaurants

• ANYONE

... too much? We thought not.

Partner Native Plants with Local Pollinators

While planting flowers over lawn grass – or at least letting lawns get tall enough to flower – is a good idea, it’s not enough. If we truly want to help the native pollinators in our area, we need to plant the foods they evolved to eat.

Pay attention to the plants you choose for gardens and green roofs. There exist, for example, many native, flowering alternatives to traditional green roof plants such as sedums. Even subbing in some of these plants is helpful.

Watch out for “nativars,” by the way. You can learn more about the difference between a nativar and a cultivar here, but suffice to say that nativars are not natives. They therefore do not provide the same benefits that a truly native species does. When you head to your local nursery, ask for pure natives that haven’t been bred for certain characteristics, which diminishes the nutritional value and attractiveness of those plants to pollinators. We will discuss this in greater detail below.

Create Green Spaces Over Impermeable Ones

It’s time we start using any and all available surfaces to create new green spaces within urban, suburban and even rural environments. Impermeable surfaces like rooftops, sidewalks, asphalt parking lots, driveways, sidewalks and streets create sheeting runoff and offer nothing to animals on long migratory journeys – or just out for a daily forage.

We need to replace both long-term habitat and pit stops, and green roofs are one of the best ways to do that. Flowering plants, vegetative havens and watering holes are critical elements in a pollinator-friendly world.

Put Rights-of-Way to Work

We love an easy solution, and rights-of-way are nothing if not that. Our cities, suburbs and countryside are crisscrossed with rights-of-ways. These are the strips of land that follow utility lines, railroads, access roads and more. Whether paved or unpaved, they offer lots of plantable area along the shoulder, in ditches and on adjacent, unused strips of land.

Were this patchwork of land planted with natives, pollinators would make every use of them. Not only is that more habitat in general, it would represent a large network that shortens the distances between food and shelter for pollinating animals on the go.

Agricultural land is another good area to consider. The land around fields is usually flat and unplanted, but could instead host the native species with which pollinators evolved. Better yet, we should plant strips of natives in between cultivated areas. As we talked about above, this incentivizes pollinators to come farther into the field – potentially increasing the ease and success of pollination.

Take Natural Approaches to Home and Garden Care

It is critical that we limit pesticide use and take natural approaches to landscaping and gardening whenever possible. Pull weeds by hand. Keep beneficial insects like ladybugs and praying mantises around, the better to avoid pesticides. Steer clear of hardcore nutrient inputs like nitrogen and phosphorous, and instead buy and tend drought-tolerant and self-sufficient native plants.

If you want to do some straight-up good, you can encourage pollinators to set up shop on your property through habitat creation – mostly through leaving more yard debris around and creating nesting habitat.

Create Nesting Habitat for Native Pollinators

Although many people flock to home beekeeping practices, which is all well and good honey-wise, this does only so much. For one thing, honeybees are part of the problem. You know that by now. For another, by focusing on them, you diminish the focus on native pollinators.

A better approach? To create viable habitat in which pollinators of all types can find a niche in which to survive and hopefully thrive. Bees need safe places to sleep (yes, bees sleep) as well as lay their eggs.

As the USDA says, “Most native bees nest underground in areas that are sunny, well-drained, and either bare or partly vegetated.”(22) When they find a good place, they’ll tunnel in, lay their eggs, deposit a ball of pollen and nectar for the young, then seal up the cavity. (Are we alone in thinking that’s super cute?)

Among the most popular natural nesting habitats are:

• Open patches of dirt

• Pieces of wood

• Piles of (plant) debris

• Hollow grass stems (native bunch grasses)

Also, if you’re going to take our above advice and leave (plant) debris and wood lying around, ideally you would put it in an out-of-the-way place where it won’t be disturbed, and where nothing is growing around it. Retaining stumps and snags is another simple way to provide habitat without doing much.

Don’t be afraid of stings, either. You have to work very, very hard to get a native bee to sting you. So go ahead and put those nests right up close to your pollinator garden!

Raise Awareness of the Pollinator Plight

Some of the people making the biggest change today are the ones trumpeting the pollinator plight to the skies. That doesn’t just mean talking, though. Talk is cheap. These people are actually doing something.

Think the honeybee setup at Ford Motor Company HQ in Dearborn, Michigan. The company is parenting almost 80,000 honeybees to get the message out. Although that’s a bit too honey-centric for us, we still like the thought.

Then how about a thank you to the good people behind the hummingbird resurgence. Institutions such as the Smithsonian and others work hard to get the message out about the hummingbird’s place in the broader ecology. (Not just a pretty Christmas tree ornament, people!)

Others pound pavement to raise awareness of the especial dangers faced by migratory pollinators such as Wisconsin’s monarch butterfly or Arizona’s many transient flocks.

Wherever you are in the U.S., the point is the same: We need to focus more on what pollinators are, what they do and why we should care. And we need to tell others about it.

While the above are good steps to take overall, we need to pay special attention to what we can do in cities.

How Can We Support Pollinators in Urban Environments?

A common misunderstanding is that we can only help foster pollinators in wild spaces, where greenery and flowers already abound, but that’s not true. There is actually much we can do specifically to help pollinators in urban and suburban environments.

Use Native Plants Rather Than Cultivars or “Nativars”

So you want to support pollinators in cities! Only one problem: You’re not using the right plants. Whoopsie.

This is a common mistake that new gardeners make. It even happens to experienced green thumbs, who are used to making seasonal (or monthly, or weekly, or daily … ahem, never mind) trips to the garden center. The problem can be summed up in a single word: cultivars. And when it comes to a healthy pollinator environment, cultivars just don’t play nice.

Why? Because they’re clones. Propagating plants by seed typically doesn’t result in a plant with the exact same characteristic, so if you want to keep selling that exact same plant, you have to clone them.

There are a few problems here. A cultivar disrupts the natural cycle of flowering, fertilizing, seed dropping, germinating, and so on. In so doing, the cultivation process substantially cuts down on genetic diversity, making the gene pool weaker and more susceptible to catastrophe, which is its own serious problem. Don’t be fooled into thinking a “nativar” is a native, either; it’s just a native plant that has been cultivated until it becomes something entirely other.

In addition to weakening the plant gene pool, evidence shows that these plants aren’t as good for pollinators.

As the Xerxes Society explains, “Some [cultivars] are bred for a different color, some for double blooms or flower shape, others for disease resistance. For example, purple coneflower has been bred into scores of cultivars with all manner of colors, double blooms, etc. Many of these cultivars are sterile and have no benefit to pollinators. Others have flower structures so complex a pollinator couldn’t find its way to the center with a map, a compass, and a native guide.” (23)

The nutritional benefits of such plants are also up in the air.

The takeaway? Avoid such plants and opt for true natives instead. If you don’t know what to look for, head to a native nursery and ask!

Install Green Roofs to Transform Barren Spaces

Get ready for the greatest romance of all time: pollinators and the green roofs that love them.

Okay, fine. We oversold that “greatest romance” thing a teeny bit. Still, the relationship between green roofs and bees is a healthy one … and solves a lot of problems.

Green roofs effectively increase the amount of habitat in cities, fostering urban ecology wherever they are. Not only that, they give bees a resting spot between hives and the habitats from which they gather pollen and nectar. For solitary bees, they provide homes.

Many green roofs, especially rooftop gardens, also provide a lot of food themselves. Native flowers and pollen-rich specimens such as lavender, mints, coneflowers, and other exotic but valuable plants all help native bees and honeybees thrive. And by pollinating them, bees help those plants fully cover the green roof and provide maximum benefits for stormwater and energy savings.

We’ve got to keep this romance alive, people – and that means helping the pollinators and the rooftops themselves. It starts with a great green roof design, expert plant choices, bee-friendly touches and ongoing stewardship of the rooftop habitat.

Roofs aren’t the only spaces we need to green up, though.

Create Other Urban Green Spaces to Combat Declining Diversity

Pollinator diversity is a serious issue. We face not only declining numbers of pollinators, but declining types. Green roofs are one fabulous way to combat this through providing food and habitat; green spaces at grade are another.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough simply to start planting lots of flowers. As discussed, pollen-rich herb and flower species may not prove effective in increasing pollinator diversity if they are not local. If all we plant are exotic species that foster non-native bees, then the native pollinators on which we still very much rely will continue to decline.

We need to offer more green space, with more local plants therein. We’re talking rights-of-way, empty lots, urban gardens, businesses, downtown areas (that focus on native rather than seasonal plantings), and residential spaces.

Where Does Citizen Science Come In?

Citizen science is one of the best ways to add to our overall knowledge base about pollinators. It’s simply not possible for environmentalists on their own to count, track and implement measures on behalf of pollinators.

That’s where the rest of us come in. As we’ve discussed in the case of monarch butterflies, joining the effort to catalogue insect species and report on their numbers provides invaluable intel to scientists. These numbers help us inform policymakers and create laws that do more to help the birds and the bees.

You can either join efforts to go to wild areas and catalogue, or you can plant pollinator-friendly species at home and do your work from there. Both are very helpful.

So ... ready to get started?

Start Helping Pollinators Now!

We get it, sometimes it feels like solving The Issues Of The World would take a more superhuman brain than yours. Honestly, we feel that way all the time.

Relax. You don’t need to do everything. You simply need to choose a course of action that will help today. That might mean planting a small native garden in the corner of your yard, kicking off that green roof project you’ve been considering, or partnering with a green roofer to steward an existing ecosystem.

Here at Ecogardens, we can help with all of the above. We also offer consulting for those who would rather helm the project themselves.

Whatever you need, we invite you to get in touch today.

And remember, you can feel free to download that report at any time to take with you, read on the airplane, show your family and friends, or print out and cover your office wall à la A Beautiful Mind.

Look, it’s an option. Just putting it out there.

That said, thanks for reading, and good luck fighting the good fight!

want that free report?

Download it now and get it instantly!

SOURCES

(1) https://www.ars.usda.gov/oc/br/ccd/index/

(2) https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/animals/flies.shtml

(3) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00379609

(4) https://www.birds.com/blog/the-important-role-of-birds-in-pollination/

(5) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9c86/e50094f7154440def8e800eb0bb548628570.pdf

(6) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2766192/

(7) http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150514-extraordinary-pollinators

(8) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4509684/

(9) https://plants.usda.gov/pollinators/Native_Pollinators.pdf

(10) https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-sheet-economic-challenge-posed-declining-pollinator-populations

(11) https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/plantsanimals/pollinate/

(12) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167880917302505

(13) https://earthsky.org/earth/honey-bees-make-poor-substitutes-for-wild-pollinators

(14) https://academic.oup.com/jee/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jee/toz295/5653961

(15) https://ento.psu.edu/pollinators/resources-and-outreach/globally-pollinators-are-in-decline

(16) https://www.xerces.org/blog/cultivar-conundrum