Remember Playing With Bugs?
During one of the conferences I attended this winter I learned that bumble bees and butterflies are actually entering into the endangered lists. I knew we were having problems but to see the rusty patched bumble bee that was abundant across more than half of our states the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said, is now “balancing precariously on the brink of extinction.”
Bees pollinate many crops we would surely miss if we didn’t have them. Imagine not having apples, blueberries, cranberries, cherries, cucumbers, pears, pumpkins, soybeans, squash, tomatoes, and watermelon! Approximately $10 billion worth of crops in the U.S. every year are pollinated by honey bees!
In the spring we will be handing our study guides but if you would like an electronic version you can download one here.
https://www.fws.gov/pollinators/pdfs/PollinatorBookletFinalrevWeb.pdf Or here: http://pollinator.org/guides.htm
The quick take off from this is if you have an area of lawn that you can give up, create a garden filled with native species. Doing so will help our pollinating friends sustain themselves and help give our future generations the same earth we had as kids.