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Celebrating and helping pollinators

Posted on June 25, 2009June 25, 2009 by Staff

Pollen on the back of a carpenter bee is carried from passion flower to passion flower.It’s National Pollinator Week and the third annual National Pollinator Week Celebration at Chatham Market Place in Pittsboro is this Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

This family-friendly celebration with special activities for children includes a treasure hunt, story telling, beekeeping demonstrations and guided tours of the onsite pollinator garden (for more information, ces.ncsu.edu/chatham/ag/SustAg/workshops.html).

Awareness of pollinators gives us reason for celebration, and for concern.

An engaging description of the plight of pollinators is Bee and Me, written by Elle McGuiness and illustrated by Heather Brown. In this beautifully illustrated children’s book, which should be required reading for adults, a bee, accidentally trapped inside a house, pleads, poetically, for release by the young boy inside:

We’re good for much more
Than just honey, you see
We bees help the flowers,
The bushes and trees
We gather their pollen
And spread it around
The only way to keep them
Growing, we’ve found …
If it weren’t for us bees, why the plants would be gone
No more peaches, no cherries, no trees to climb on,
There’d be no more apples, no flowers to smell
Still, you humans decide you don’t like us that well.

The serious lesson for young and old alike is to treat the diversity of bees and wasps and other pollinating critters with the same wonder and respect we allow colorful butterflies. These critters, buzzing or not, are necessary pollinators, without which our world would be in serious trouble. They are much too busy working to worry about people unless they are threatened or trying to protect their hives or solitary nests.

Several years ago, I learned the “bee wave” from staff at the Schoolhouse of Wonder nature school and camp at West Point on the Eno in Durham. There, children learn that all flying and crawling critters are respected – i.e., neither stomped nor swatted. Using the bee wave – a slow, gentle waving of the hand in front of the face – is very effective in making any curious flying critter move safely away.

In addition to thoughtless swatting by humans, pollinators face other challenges. The decline of honey bees is widely publicized, but less known is the critical decline in populations of native bees, which account for 85 percent of pollination of large-scale food crops, home gardens and wild plants. This decline results from habitat loss, pesticide use and invasion of non-native plants.

Home owners and gardeners, whether on large rural properties or small suburban lots, can play a positive role. National and state organizations encourage gardening with pollinators in mind by eliminating pesticides, replacing invasive exotic plants with natives and including a great diversity of species and habitats on home grounds.

My wild friend Pete, with a tiny half-acre residential vegetable and native-plant garden in Durham, is a certified pollinator gardener.

He has a beautiful sign on his front yard to prove it! I’m getting ready to apply for one. You can too. Some great folks in Georgia, associated with the Environmental Education Alliance of Georgia and the Georgia Native Plant Society, manage a Monarchs Across Georgia Pollinator Habitat Certification Program. (monarchacrossga.org/MAGCertification.php). North Carolina gardens are welcome to join the growing number of certified pollinator gardens around the country.

Enjoy the celebration in Pittsboro this Saturday, and do your part every day to encourage and protect pollinators.

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