I’ve really been enjoying watching all of the pollinators in my yard this summer. Between my milkweed and mimosa, I’ve got scads of honey bees, bumble bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and everything else that likes that sort of thing. I’m really pleased!
My question is…how does me having pollinator-friendly plants in my yard help the global plant biome and I guess, specifically, farming? It feels to me that the bees in my yard are just bee-ing around my yard and my neighborhood and that’s it. Not to say that I don’t love all the healthy plants and flowers here, and veggies from my neighbor’s garden. But am I really doing anything for the global good?
Where does a bumble bee go after it leaves my mimosa??
Bumblebees can fly amazing distances considering their small size, as much as 10 or even 15 km (6 - 9 miles) per day, iirc. The bee who visits your garden may also be polliinating a commercial apple orchard in the next town over.
Most of our calories do not rely on insect pollinators. If you look at percentage of crops just by variety, it’s more significant. But many (maybe most – I’m not sure off the top of my head) will use commercial honeybees.
I think this is one of those feel-good environmental measures that’s been distorted a bit beyond reality.
Our commercial food crops are typically Many of our food crops (by diversity, not calorie… thanks, Ruken) are old-world crops pollinated by old-world honeybees. European bees are actually an invasive species in North America, but we need them for human foods, so as a marketing tactic, we lump them in with the butterflies in your backyard in an effort to make people care. Pretty gardens and fuzzy insects sells better than agricultural policy.
What about the native pollinators in your backyard? They provide two broad environmental boons
they make you give a damn and think, like you just did, about humanity’s place in nature, which can be a gateway/staircase to more conservation values/behaviors. Sort of like how recycling in and of itself isn’t super meaningful, but for a large swath of the population, it’s the only time they’ll think of the environment as a whole.
native pollinators provide ecosystem services in that they help maintain native habitats, which house other native species (other insects, other plants, herbivores, carnivores), which as a whole contribute to everything from soil stability to CO2 sequestration to scholarly material (for studying diseases, or biomimicry, or insect intelligence, or population theory, whatever), to outdoor recreation for humans, etc. Some pollinators are keystone species, meaning they can cause an extinction cascade if they disappear, where the plants they pollinate die, the insects that call the plants home die, the insects that eat those insects die, the rodents that eat those insects die, the birds that eat those rodents die, the plants that depend on bird travel die, causing yet another extinction cascade, etc. That’s sort of a worst-case scenario, but in all honesty, we’re quickly approaching many worst-case scenarios with not just individual pollinators but large swaths of species facing rapid extinction.
So between 1 and 2, the hope is that in caring about your backyard pollinators, you will be doing your part in preserving your local ecosystems, but also maybe extending that ethos into voting for pro-environmental candidates who are actually able to effect change at regional, national, and global scales. I suppose that’s a sort of butterfly effect all its own.
And hummingbirds travel even more widely. The hummingbirds visiting your garden will be off pollinating flowers in Mexico and Central America during the winter. While they don’t pollinate many crop plants, they are important in maintaining plant diversity over spans of thousands of miles.
There are specialized trucks with bee hives - essentially bee farms on wheels that go from California to Maine. There was an NPR story describing their use on Walnuts in California.
Those hives pollinate specific crops on specific farms.
Native pollinators, and honeybees from smaller beekeepers and/or which have naturalized, pollinate everything else that needs it. Some plants which require insect pollination can’t even be pollinated by honeybees, because they tend to flower in weather conditions in which the domestic honeybee won’t fly, or because the flower size and shape isn’t suited to honeybees. Even for some farm crops, the honeybee may not be the best pollinator.
Habitat needs to be diverse and widespread. The reason they’re trucking domestic honeybees all around the country is that very little survives in a large-scale monocropped field except for the one specific crop being grown in it. Very little also survives in a modern single-species lawn. The contribution made by any one home garden towards habitat and biodiversity doesn’t amount to much on its own. The contribution made by millions such can make a large difference.