The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do to This Spring to Save Endangered Bees
Love gardening? You could be the answer to saving endangered bees. It's no secret that bees in America and Europe are in trouble. From 2015-2016, U.S. beekeepers lost 44 percent of their honey bee colonies. Today, more than a quarter of the nation's bees are at risk of extinction, in large part due to the decline of natural habitats and floral resources. That's quite an alarming loss, considering plenty of crops, from apples and cherries to avocados and almonds, rely on bees for pollination. General Mills even recently pulled the mascot Buzz the Bee from their Honey Nut Cheerios packaging to raise awareness about bee endangerment.
But a scientific study published in Nature Today suggests that restoring natural habitats by planting a mix of wildflowers that bloom in the spring and summer could be the key to quadrupling the survival rate of these powerful pollinators.
The two-year study in Buckinghamshire, UK, led by Dr. Claire Carvell, senior ecologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, investigated the effects of habitat quality on year-over-year survival rates of bumblebee families. By using non-harmful DNA sampling techniques on the female bees, the scientists were able to track which families survived into the second year and which died out. It turns out, four times as many bumblebees survived when they lived near a variety of wildflowers.
"The findings suggest that increasing flowers provided by spring-flowering trees, hedgerow plants and crops across the landscape-in combination with summer flower resources along field edges-can increase the probability of family survival by up to four times," Carvell told the Daily Mail.
Of course, more robust data is needed, as Dr. Matthew Heard, another ecologist at the Centre, pointed out, "but our study strongly suggests that conservation interventions can have a lasting, positive impact on wild pollinators in agricultural landscapes."
So how can you help? If you happen to have some spare land on your property (even a few square feet!), plant a range of wildflowers that bloom in different seasons.
(h/t: DailyMail)
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