In order to reproduce, most flowering plants rely on animals to move their pollen. In turn, pollinators rely on flowers for food, including both nectar and pollen. If you're a gardener, you might want to support this partnership by planting flowers. But if you live in an area without a lot of green space, you might wonder whether it's worth the effort.
Writing for , Laura Russo, a University of Tennessee assistant professor who , shares her showing that bees, in particular, don't really care about the landscape surrounding flower gardens. They seem to zero in on the particular types of flowers they like, no matter what else is around.
To design a garden that supports the greatest number and diversity of pollinators, don't worry about what your neighbours are doing or not doing. Just focus on planting different kinds of flowers—and lots of them.
Comparing different landscapes
To test whether bees are more plentiful in natural areas, Russo and her planted identical gardens—roughly 10 feet by 6.5 feet (3 x 2 metres)—in five different landscapes around eastern Tennessee that ranged from cattle pastures and organic farms to a botanical garden and an arboretum. All five gardens were planted in March of 2019 and contained 18 species of native perennials from the mint, sunflower and pea families.
Over the course of the flowering season, the team surveyed pollinators by collecting the insects that landed on the flowers for counting and identification. The sampling took place in a carefully standardized way. Each week, they sampled every flowering plant in every garden, in every landscape, for five minutes each. They used a modified, hand-held vacuum dubbed the "Bug Vac" and repeated this sampling every week that flowers were in bloom for three years.
They wanted to test whether the area immediately surrounding the gardens—the floral neighbourhood—made a difference in pollinator abundance, diversity, and identity. So they also surveyed the area around the gardens, in a radius of about 160 feet (roughly 50 metres).
To their surprise, the researchers found the on the abundance, diversity, and composition of the pollinators coming to our test gardens. Instead, they were mostly determined by the number and type of flowers. Otherwise, pollinators were remarkably similar at all sites. A sunflower in a cattle pasture had, by and large, the same number and types of visitors as a sunflower in a botanical garden.
Menu planning for pollinators
The team used native perennial plants in the study because there's evidence they for flower-visiting insects. They chose from three plant families because each offers different nourishment.
Plants in the mint family (Lamiaceae), for example, and have easily accessible flowers that attract a wide variety of insects. Russo recommends including plants from the mint family if you want to provide a large and diverse group of insects energy for flight. If you live in Tennessee, some examples are mountain mint, wood mint, and Cumberland rosemary. You can easily native to your area.
While some pollinators enjoy nectar, others get all their fat and protein from . Flowers from the sunflower family (Asteraceae), including asters and coreopsis, offer large quantities of both pollen and nectar and also have . Plants from this family are good for a range of pollinators, including many , such as the blue-eyed, long-horned bee (Melissodes denticulatus), which feasts primarily on ironweed (Vernonia fasciculata), also a member of the sunflower family.
If you want to offer flowers that have the highest protein content to nourish the next generation of strong pollinators, consider plants from the pea family (Fabaceae), such as dwarf indigo, false indigo and bush clover. Some of the plants in this family do not even offer nectar as a reward. Instead, they provide high protein pollen that's . If you include plants from the pea family in your garden, you may observe fewer visitors, but they will be receiving pollen with high protein levels.
Selecting a few native perennials from each of these three families, all widely available in garden centres, is a good place to start. Just as a diversity of food is important for human health, a mixture of flower types offers pollinators a varied and healthy diet. Interestingly, the diversity of human diets is directly linked to pollinators, because most of the colour and variety in human diets comes from plants pollinated by insects.
Plant it and they will come
Maybe you've heard that in number and variety. This issue is of particular concern for humans, who rely on insects and other animals to pollinate food crops. Pollinators are indeed facing many threats, from .
Thankfully, gardeners can provide an incredible service to these valuable animals just by planting more flowers. As this research shows, small patches of garden can help boost pollinators—even when the surrounding landscape has few resources for them. The one constant in all this research is that insects love flowers. The more flowers and the more types of flowers, the more pollinators Earth will have.
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