To celebrate Green Week in Haddonfield, the library held a talk on the importance of various pollinators in the local environment.
Michael Haberland, of the Rutgers Cooperative Extension, called his discussion, “Honeybees Get All the Attention: The Role of Pollinators in the Environment and Threats to their Survival.” He described pollination as the movement of pollen from the male part of one flower to the female parts of several.
“So we depend on pollinators to do that,” he said.
Haberland then described how much produce and food is created by pollination and its pollinators. He showed an image of a Whole Foods supermarket produce section lacking all the food that uses pollination to illustrate how much humans rely on pollinators.
“We’re not going to starve because there’s a lot of wind pollinated crops, rice, corn, soybeans, so there’s food,” Haberland offered, describing the hypothetical of all pollinators disappearing. “But all the tasty food, that food you like, those fruits and vegetables that you really like to eat because they taste good or they blend in well with your meal, they would all be gone because the majority of them needed to be pollinated.”
Haberland then explained that a major factor in the decrease in pollinators over the last few years is habitat loss. One major contributor to that loss is agricultural fields, though there are ways to mitigate the damage, such as including pollinator strips to give pollinators an area in which to safely live.
The bigger issue for habitat loss is lawns.
“Our lawns are the biggest irrigated crop in the nation, and they serve no value for pollinators, for any animals, except maybe some earthworms,” Haberland noted. “So that’s why we try to get people who come to these talks to start converting their part of their property into a pollinator habitat.”
One of the major ways to aid that, Haberland observed, “is by planting native plants, though that comes with some challenges of its own. They (people) don’t know what the term native plant means, because when they go to the big-box stores, they don’t have much in them.
“They have, like, next to no native plants,” added Haberland, who also explained that many landscapers themselves don’t know what native plants are.
He then showed slides of of colorful plants native to the region, with examples of some that library attendees could plant in their own yards to help pollinators.
“So when you plant these gardens,” Haberland advised, “you want to plant multiple species that bloom at different times through the year.”
Haberland described bees as the “most important” pollinators, explaining how those that are native pick up pollen all over their bodies due to their generation of an electrostatic charge from flying. He also discussed other pollinators that are not often talked about, including birds, bats, beetles and wasps, then mentioned that butterflies are not very effective pollinators as a consequence of their long legs and tongues that don’t allow much pollen to stick.
Haberland also suggested that his audience members could provide a place for pollinators to live by setting up a structure sometimes called a beehouse, a set of tubes in a frame that offers shelter to some of the types of bees that nest in them.
