Pollinators: Their impact on your life, and how to protect them.

You sit down during your lunch break, stomach growling. You had a long morning, and you can feel a tiny headache coming on. The coffee you had at 8AM is long gone, and you’re ready for some real food. You eagerly pull a bright, shiny red apple from your bag and bite into it with a sharp crunch. Still cold from being kept in the fridge, the juice is refreshing. Sweet. You also feel your mood improve when you remember that you packed your favorite chocolate bar for dessert, and your headache begins to subside.

Cocoa Beans: The flowers are pollinated by tiny midges

Coffee, fruit, and chocolate. All of these incredible flavours would be lost without pollinators.

We’ve all heard that bees pollinate flowers. We see them working hard all summer long. Fuzzy little black and yellow bodies zip around sweet smelling blossoms, collecting nectar for their hives.

The impact of pollinators in our lives may seem small, but they carry out one of the most life-sustaining tasks on Earth. They help ensure we have food and are a popular topic around sustainability and climate change discussions. There have even been conversations about how if we lose bees, then humans would not be able to thrive.

Pollinators: They aren't just bees

Bees are well known as pollinators, but they aren’t our only ones. Bats, butterflies, hummingbirds, and yes, even wasps, play a role in pollination. Nectar bats are particularly well-adapted to pollinating flowers and sport specialized noses. They can also fly much farther distances than insects, contributing to long distance pollination and plant diversity.

Unfortunately, there are very few nectar bats in Canada, so 70% of our pollination comes from bees (source). While we do know some pollination occurs from wind, insects are responsible for ¾ of our food growth (source) and fall under the environmental branch of sustainability.

What happens without pollinators?

Food growth depends heavily on pollination, so it’s no wonder that loss of bees is such a prominently discussed topic. Recall the feedback loop from our fashion post and let’s apply it to a simple scenario.

Bears are omnivores and eat both meat and plants, with about 70% of their diet being plant matter, especially berries.

Poor pollination feedback loop

Imagine if there was inadequate pollination of berry bushes in the spring. This leads to a lack of berries, and bears would lose a significant food source.

This would result in more bears not making it through their long winter sleeps. 

The following spring, the bear’s ecosystem is negatively impacted by their loss. There are less seeds spread by bears, less digging in the soil for roots and insects, and less hunting of species like deer and moose.

This leads to a population increase of the deer and moose, but there are fewer plants growing for them to eat, and they eat down whatever plants are available. The lack of availability in plants results in more inadequate pollination.

It gets complicated very quickly. But think back to your breakfast and lunch. Can you imagine it without coffee, or fresh fruit and veggies? How would that impact your day? Your life? Could this really happen in our lifetime?

In some areas of the world, it already has.

Current Issues

Climate change and pesticide misuse are some of the biggest threats to our pollinators. There is an issue that has arisen in China, particularly in the southwest regions, where pesticide use has reduced pollinator population drastically. The lack of pollinators has now forced Chinese fruit tree farms to pollinate their trees by hand (source).

This is a challenge that we also face at MacEwan. Our tower gardens have lots of benefits, including the ability to grow food year-round.

But because our tower gardens are indoors and produce in the winter, we also need to pollinate our plants by hand. This process typically involves using a small paintbrush and picking up pollen from one flower, then brushing it onto a different flower.

Painstaking.

When you think of the manual process, it’s easy to get an idea of just how important our pollinators are. They do an incredible amount of work!

Luckily there are lots of ways we can help without actually going through the process of hand brushing flowers.

Actions you can take

If you have a green thumb, try growing native plant species that are known to attract butterflies and bees to your garden.

You can also encourage others to limit their use of pesticides. Instead, look into buying insects that are beneficial in your garden. For example, you can purchase ladybugs to help eliminate aphids. Check out The Bug Lady and you can see lots of other options for controlling other types of pests.

Are you in charge of mowing the lawn? Then remember that dandelions are an important early food source for bees in the spring. We know that many people consider these plants to be pesky on their own, but they do help to support us by supporting the bees.

Next time you eat breakfast and sip on your favorite coffee, or bite into a fresh piece of fruit, remember to thank a pollinator!

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Are you interested in learning more about how you can support our pollinators? Consider our upcoming workshop with Edmonton & Area Land Trust!

On June 4/25, join Ciara Fraser from the Edmonton & Area Land Trust to learn all about the Land Trust and their work to help conserve pollinators!

Find out how many bee species are in the province, why establishing hives is only part of the solution towards helping pollinators, and what we can do to ensure pollinators thrive into the future. Register here!

Missed the presentation? Here’s a link to some of the topics EALT touched on during their presentation: https://www.ealt.ca/protecting-pollinators