Are We SAVING the RIGHT BEES- Create a GARDEN For SPECIALIST POLLINATORS — Ep. 128

It honestly seems like one minute I was wearing my swimsuit and the next minute I was wearing six layers of clothes. Definitely got chilly out. Not too long ago we did a nice tour of this pollinator garden and I shared that we're actually going to be tweaking the pollinator garden and other gardens around here at Flock for specialist pollinators. Now if you missed that episode, what is a specialist pollinator? Well a specialist pollinator is some type of pollinator so it could be bees, it could be wasps, ants, flies, beetles, anything that really pollinates flowers. Thrips even. There's lots of things that actually pollinate flowers. It's not just like bees and wasps for instance. But these are insects typically that have anatomical and morphological features that are specialized for specific pollen from a species, a genus, or a family of plants. So they really only go to that specific species, genus, or family of plants in order to get pollen. And the difference is, you know, a lot of our... we talk about pollinator gardens and oftentimes we think of like butterflies and moths, so the Lepidoptera, right? But a lot of those are not necessarily the best pollinators. They actually are going around to the flower mainly for nectar. And nectar, you could think of like nectar as like the sugars. That's the carbohydrates, that's the lipids, that's the stuff that probably gives you energy really quickly. And then pollen really is the protein. So it is the pollen that a lot of these specialist pollinators are specializing on. In some cases there's also some solitary specialist bees that are focusing on resins within the plants. So as I started to learn about this, I became really interested. I'm like, oh my gosh, we've got to tweak our pollinator beds and our beds in general, our plants here in general, for specialist pollinators. And it's really hard for me to explain, but like being able to provide plants for insects that I may have never even recognized or noticed before gives me a really deep level of satisfaction. Just knowing that I could actually provide that food source or at least select for that food source and maybe see some of those specialist pollinators, like that's good enough for me. So I think next year we're really going to dial in our specialist pollinator plants. And one work that I would like to point you to, and I think a lot of folks ask me about this in the Pollinator Garden Tour, one work that I'd like to point you to is Jared Fowler's work. So I believe he put out some work back in 2016 of specialist pollinators and their pollinator plants. And it's not just focused on the Northeast, although the Northeast is heavily focused on, it's actually focused on elsewhere throughout the United States. So you get a better sense as to what grouping of plants actually work well in your region. So I don't want you to take away from this saying like, oh, you live in New York and yes, I'm going to focus on more of the specialist pollinators in New York, but you'll have a lot of information to take away and use in your home in whatever region. And obviously if you're like watching from a different country, I'm sure there's groups in your country that may actually be doing specialist pollinator work. Or if there's not, then you can maybe inquire with like organizations or NGOs or extension offices or anything along those lines, universities that could be doing some of that work or that you can inspire some of that work. Now, one of the things that I will make mention of is, and somebody had asked this as well, is like, how do you know whether you should get a cultivar or like a nativar they're called like native cultivated variety. So this is a great example. This is Joe pie weed, but this is a cultivar called baby Joe. So it's actually a shorter version because some of these eutrochium maculatums or eutrochium purpureums, which are the native ones here grow very, very tall. And we do have some of those native ones actually growing in and around the ponds and the lakes here. But how do you know whether you should get a nativar or a native species that's maybe bioregional to your area? Now, I'm not opposed to having cultivated or nativars or cultivated varieties, but the problem with some of those cultivated varieties, if you're focusing on specialist pollinators, is that these specialist pollinators have a really narrow window or narrow band of time when they're actually looking for pollen. And oftentimes with cultivated varieties or ones that you've gotten from a different region, they're actually flowering at the wrong time that that specialist pollinator is visiting the plants. So that could be a problem because obviously the food source doesn't match up with the specialist pollinator. So if you're going to get cultivated varieties of a specific plant because it has a low stature, it has a different color bloom, it has a different leaf, it has a double flower, then do yourself a favor and also get the native species, not the cultivated variety. Get the native species as well. Put it somewhere else in the landscape. Maybe it doesn't make sense in a human contrived bed like this one, but maybe it makes sense in kind of the more natural regions within your landscape. Or don't get the cultivar altogether. Get the native species if you want, again, to focus on native pollinators, specialist pollinators, not just native pollinators. Other things that I thought were really interesting here in New York, about 25% of our pollinators, our native pollinators, are specialists. So that's a huge number. That's a quarter of our pollinators that were at least studied. And I think we have close to somewhere around 450 different species of bees, for instance. Many of them are solitary. And if you recall, one of the ways that we were attracting wildlife and one of the ways that I was suggesting to attract wildlife is we have some of these open snags. You know, we'll leave some of these pithy stems up because a lot of these stems are used for overwintering or housing bees. And then we have, you know, kind of these mason bee homes right here. So you could see that this was in use because there's all this mud here and they use mud. That's really interesting, but only a small percentage of our specialist bees actually nest above ground. Very small percentage. So osmia is the genus of bee that typically is the mason bee that uses those mason bee homes. The majority of our specialist pollinators are actually nesting in the ground. So, you know, we had that like those red flags there because we noticed that there's yellow yellow jackets nest and they're coming up out of the ground and they are social insects. So they are, there's a lot of them, but a lot of these specialist bees will nest on very similar kind of like muddy areas and have holes within the ground. So actually, one of the suggestions that I have for you is not to use such a thick layer of mulch. So I usually mulch the beds pretty heavily and we're taught to kind of mulch the beds, even one or two or three inches of mulch on top to suppress the weeds. Well, you know, I tried to leave less mulch here in this area in case I could actually attract some of the specialist pollinators, especially the ground nesting bees, because there's so many specialist bees that actually nest in the ground. And another thing to really consider is if you have the specialist pollinator plants nearby, they don't want to travel too far for their food, right? You know, it's like if your kitchen is all the way down at the end of the road, you know, you're not going to want to go to your kitchen as very much. And so their foraging sites and their nesting sites have to be pretty close to one another. I think within like 500 meters or so. So if you have nesting sites right next to some of your specialist pollinator plants, then that's actually amazing for those specialist pollinators. So when I started to look and see what plants have been listed by entomologists as specialist pollinator plants for those specialist pollinators, I realized that we have a fair number of the genus of plants. There's some that are really specific species. It's about 81 percent. And I was like, all right, well, that's not 100 percent. But next year we could focus on getting 100 percent of those plants that are for specialist pollinators. Then I started to wonder, well, how many of those plants do you actually need in order to cater to bees or a specialist pollinator? I'm really talking about specialist bees and solitary bees when I talk about specialist pollinators, because that's what I'm kind of referring to because of the, if I could step back, kind of put the cart before the horse. But the reason why I became interested in this was because a number of scientists, specifically a lot of them from Cornell University, produced a study called the Empire State Native Pollinator Study. And this is like over three years that they were collecting insects outside and they were comparing it to data from 140 years of museum data of insects that had been collected. And they realized that there's a really steep decline in not only native pollinators, but specialist pollinators, specifically specialist bees. And so I think that you could probably extrapolate that, what's happening in our state, to other places as well. And the biggest issue around that is habitat loss one. Okay. Duh. Like we know that, but then also it's human induced in the sense that we're actually picking plants that are not native to our area or that are cultivated varieties versus actually like bioregional native species. So that's part of the importance of it as well. So again, like I said, if I could have control of that within my gardens and like try to source more bioregional species, it's hard. And literally I did come back. I'm going on a little tangent here, but it's related. Trust me. I just actually spoke to a number of garden centers at a big annual meeting. And I was like, please run with this. I want to go to one of our garden centers. I want to go in and I just don't want to see pollinator gardens with a bunch of like butterfly bush, which is not native to the area at all. But it's always promoted as a butterfly plant or a pollinator plant. Fine. Like I said, pollinators are attracted to that. They're probably attracted to the nectar. It is a pretty flower. I don't actually have any butterfly bush here. I want to go into a garden center and I want to see all of my specialist pollinator plants right there. Like tell me what plants that I need to put into my garden to show me that I will get specialist pollinators and that I could see those beautiful bees and wasps and everything coming to those flowers. And I think, you know, part of this issue of like, oh, I don't see insects like the way that I used to see insects 20 or 30 years ago. Well, I think that's partially because of our choices that we're making in our gardens and in kind of the larger landscape. So again, like deer friendly plants, this is another thing when I think about like, or sorry, deer resistant plants, not deer friendly, but deer resistant plants. A lot of those plants are not native. So we make those choices because we want to see some type of foliage and we don't want our plants browsed on. Well, you know, those choices have a much larger ramification and a much larger issue overall to maybe some of the things that we don't see as much, which is again, those insects. So one of those questions that I had asked myself really is like, oh, how many plants do I actually need in order to be able to attract specialist pollinators? Because you could get like one or two plants, but is it enough to actually raise a brood of insects? Right. So there's a lot of things that we've learned about like our caterpillar eating or insect eating birds, that they need to have like thousands of caterpillars to raise one brood in a year. So you better hope that you have like plants that caterpillars like to eat in your neighborhood. So this is kind of related. So I started to look a little bit more and dig a little bit more. And I think Jared Fowler was the one who said that you basically need five flowers for one baby bee. And I think that's kind of like maybe a massive generalization, but I think that's a really good pin to pin in our hats to say, or put a feather in our hat and to say, okay, well, if I have five flowers and five flowers, maybe, you know, like, let's go to this liatris right over here. So this is liatris aspera. You know, there's, there's many different flowers. It's a large inflorescence, right? So there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. There's probably over a dozen different flowers on that one plant. Same thing here, aster. In the asteraceae family, it's a very popular pollinator plant. You don't see any pollinators on this right now. It's cold this morning. It is really, really cold. And you don't see pollinators until like the sun is at the zenith and then they start to come out. But we started to see a lot of our native pollinators slowly kind of passing away for the season. But this is asteraceae. I'll go over different plants that are important for pollinators, but this is one that is a real important plant. So if we focus on our native meadow, which we are doing, which is about seven acres, scientists kind of suspect that you could produce about 25,000 bees off of one acre. So again, that's another thing, another just quantitative data point to be able to say, oh, you know, that's something that I really want to focus on. So if you have three acres of land and you want to turn, you know, two of those acres into a native meadow or one that focuses on native pollinators or specialist plants, then you could be producing 50,000 native bees off of that or supporting 50,000 native bees. And, you know, some of these solitary insects, we think about like honeybees, right? And honeybees are these eusocial creatures. So they all live together and they all work together to actually produce their food. But our solitary bees and a lot of our specialist bees are just not like that. They, you know, produce only so many young and they are kind of like singly living in the ground. Now they may live close to one another in close proximity, but they're not swarming like honeybees do. And I've had a lot of folks ask here whether we're going to get honeybees here because it's like kind of a popular thing that people do, right? In homesteading, you have your own honey, you raise your bees. It's kind of a cool thing. But then what I learned is that honeybees are actually fairly aggressive. And if you have a high honeybee population in your area, then those honeybees might actually outcompete your specialist pollinators. So that's something that we're really thinking about because we want to actually focus on specialist pollinators. That's something that we're thinking about that maybe it's not going to be such a great idea in order to have a bunch of honeybees. And we do have a neighbor that has honeybees. Oh, look at all the ducks over there. I don't know if you could see them. It's like a whole mallard family. I didn't mean to scare them, but as I was saying with the honeybees, they could really outcompete some of those specialist insects. And we have a neighbor that has some honeybees that do come over here. And it's really nice to see a bunch of generalist pollinators. And that's what they are. They're more generalist pollinators. They could outcompete some of the specialist bees because if you have some of those specialist pollinator plants, they will go to those specialist pollinator plants. They almost like don't discriminate what kinds of plants that are out there. So we have lots of this is euthymia. This is a type of goldenrod. Canada goldenrod could be a very aggressive native species and outcompete all of our other native species. But this is goldenrod in general. That's solidago is a really good plant for native pollinators. We have well, this is boneset. I don't know if there's any specialist pollinators on boneset, but I see all these little asters, these aster type plants, like even these purple flowers. These are so important. And actually, I was just out here not too long ago. And I was like, oh, I should probably start looking for some of these native pollinators. And I did. I saw some like sweat bees. So they have like this really beautiful green metallic sheen. And you don't see a lot of them on them because, again, they're solitary bees. But once you start to look, you start to notice. And once you notice and you know, it's very hard to dial it back and say, no, I don't want to go that route. So this is something that I know I'm going to be pursuing a lot here. You could see in the back. Not too long ago, this was blooming. This is a hibiscus. It's no longer blooming. But again, this is a cultivated variety of hibiscus. I made it a point to actually go out and get two plants of our native hibiscus, which is basically that's called I think they call it swamp mallow. And I planted it also around this half lake area. So this is definitely much more naturalistic. And there's a lot of plants that are specialist pollinator plants here in New York that grow around wet areas. And I'm going to take advantage of the fact that we have these large bodies of water. This is actually the largest body of water here and start planting some of those native plants. So, you know, I can't emphasize enough that this is going to be something that we really go wholeheartedly on. And hopefully, maybe we could even partner with folks at Cornell University in order to be able to monitor, you know, what happens when you actually do bring some of these plants back. Do you actually see some of those native pollinators coming back? That would make my heart sing, really. One of the other ones I had noticed when we went to Mount Cuba Center, they had talked about Heuchera americana. So if you know native plants, Heuchera is a plant that has been highly cultivated. So you have lots of different colored leaves of Heuchera, and they have they're called fairy bells. They have these like really pretty inflorescences that grow on these tall stalks that are really tiny, like little buttons. But we're often attracted by those leaves that have a lot of color. And we overlook something that would be maybe our more native variety that has just green on its leaves. So I made it a point after learning about that from Mount Cuba Center that this Coletti's bee that's native to the area that has been disappearing only uses Heuchera americana as its pollen source. So that's a species example. It's a species that uses a specific species, not even a grouping of species, and doesn't use the cultivar. So that's one that I actually brought back in great number. I think I bought like 32 plants in, and I kind of dotted them around in specific areas. And I really do hope to see some of our native Coletti's bees come back. So hopefully, as I mentioned, that we could just, you know, work with maybe Cornell. Maybe I could bring on some of the scientists. I did reach out, and they haven't actually responded back yet, because I think they're really, really busy. But it would be nice to actually do some more videos on specialist pollinators. But with knowing what I know now, I am definitely going to be selecting for plants, and not taking any of them out. Like you could see, you know, three different species of aster right here. So you have the dark purple, you have this little white flower, you have this like lavender color. And then this plant, you'll see, I just planted this. This is actually the only native tree aster that we have. And it is native to New York. It's probably not native to this region of New York. I saw pictures of this and I'm like, no, we have a tree aster? That's so cool. I actually couldn't find one that was grown natively. I guess this is a plant that's more of like a collector's plant, if you will. I actually found a nursery in Florida that was growing it. But it will get flowers very similar to this, you know, this kind of composite flower. And I was like, that's cool. So I ended up getting two of those. It looks really, really neat. And again, it's it's hardy to zone five, and we're kind of in the zone five, six. So I'm going to try that out. So it kind of gives me inspiration to look at some plants, encourage hopefully some of our growers to actually grow them. Because I want you to be in a similar position as as I would be, you know, I want to go to a nursery and find them all in one place. Right now I have to like, buy nurseries all over the place and many of that are not native to New York, in order to be able to collect and find some of these plants and plant them. It should be a little bit easier than that. And hopefully, with this knowledge, and other folks who are big proponents of seeing some of our native plants in our landscape for specialist pollinators, then this movement will grow more. There are a number of great resources to learn about specialist pollinators that you can refer to, including the work of Jared Fowler and Sam Droege, and also a wonderful PDF aptly named Creating a Pollinator Garden for Native Specialist Bees, which was compiled by a number of entomologists and botanists here in the Finger Lakes. Additionally, don't forget to check out the Empire State Native Pollinator Survey, because it really does give an important overview on the state of our native pollinators, which I think can be extrapolated worldwide. Stay tuned here because we do have future videos on attracting specialist pollinators to your garden. 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