[Pollinator] Pollinator Watch - Canada

[Kimberly Winter]

>From Peter Kevan, an article by Jim Dyer:

Bug Lovers Wanted

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Many insect pollinators - among them bees, flies, moths, butterflies
and beetles - may be facing a precarious future, much like many of our
native species of plants, mammals and birds. The declining diversity
and abundance among pollinators is emerging as the latest major
challenge to be addressed under the International Convention on
Biological Diversity. In response to this challenge, Environment
Canada and Agriculture and Agri-food Canada have jointly funded the
development of a training package to raise public and gardener
awareness about plant pollinators.

Honeybees are probably our best-known pollinators. Domesticated for
honey and wax production in medieval Europe, honeybees demonstrated
their greatest value as foraging insects that pollinated plants.
Introduced into North America with European settlement, they joined
our native bumblebees, solitary bees and other bee species as our most
important insect pollinators; floral products are their sole food
source. Wild bees have evolved as specialists. For example, squash
bees are pollinators dedicated to cucurbits (members of the gourd
family), since both are native to the New World.

Many insects have the ability to recognize and memorize floral
characteristics. Most bees, butterflies and some flies can distinguish
numerical differences in radial patterns in flowers. Hemispheric and
radial flowers (such as asters) are the simplest types of flowers with
their nectar and pollen easily accessed. They are the first choice of
beetles and flies, but are visited by many pollinators, including bees
and butterflies.

Radial patterns have disappeared in the complex bilateral flowers in
favour of insect-specific shapes including long, tubular, curved
corollas with trap doors. Bees, bumblebees and butterflies, as well as
birds and bats, mainly visit three-dimensional flowers, including
bilateral flowers such as beardtongue (Penstemon spp.) and tubular
flowers such as trumpet creepers (Campsis radicans). Nectaries, the
cavities under the anthers that store the nectar that pollinating
insects seek, have also co-evolved with pollinators into the variety
of spur and coil shapes seen in three-dimensional flowers.

Native pollinators are as essential to wild flowering plants as they
are to cultivated crops. Inadequate seed set in crops is usually
easily recognized. Symptoms of inadequate pollination for wildflowers
may go unnoticed for years or decades since many are perennials, and
individuals may survive for years without successfully reproducing.
This may doom the population to extinction when those individuals
complete their life span.

Pollinator habitat, including nesting sites, food sources and mating
sites, needs to be protected. Flower-rich field borders, fence lines
and hedgerows, where non-crop forage plants are not treated as weeds,
provide alternative food sources and encourage beneficial insects.
Plants such as thistles (Cirsium spp.) and milkweeds (Asclepias spp.)
should be viewed as bee forage. Nectar-rich flowers attract beneficial
predators as well as pollinating insects to the garden. Providing
windbreaks, maintaining riparian forests and planting nectar-producing
trees such as apples helps protect pollinators.

Fragmentation of plant communities leads to declines in all wildlife,
including pollinators. Small wildlife reserves need to be connected
with undeveloped corridors.

In prairie grasslands, many flowering wild plants support native
pollinators, mainly bumblebees, which are in danger from overgrazing
of the prairie by cattle. Early cutting of hay - before bloom - also
deprives pollinators of their food, and pollinator habitat is
destroyed as grasslands are brought into annual crop production.

Pesticides have a direct negative impact on native pollinators. Even
at sub-lethal levels, pesticides affect longevity, memory, navigation
and foraging abilities. Mosquito control has caused major kills of
honeybees (the impacts on native pollinators are unknown but certainly
severe). Herbicides eliminate the natural forage that wild pollinators
need before and after crops bloom.

International experts on biological diversity have become alarmed at
the status of pollinators. Not having enough trained experts to
monitor pollination processes effectively, they proposed training
parataxonomists - volunteer observers who are capable of making and
recording scientifically valid sightings of pollinating insects.
Environment Canada is responding to this proposal by expanding its
Nature Watch programs (which include Plant Watch and Frog Watch) to
include insect pollinators. As part of the Pollinator Watch program,
observers will be asked to identify the differences among the four
insect orders that most frequently visit flowers without resorting to
destructive sampling. While an effective watch program requires a few
rules about observing and keeping records, it will not turn volunteers
into instant entomologists, or ask for species identification.

The first step towards launching a pilot watch program was taken last
fall in the Waterloo/Cambridge area. A two-hour training session
included basic pollinator ecology and identification of the most
important insects. Throughout the coming growing season participants
will be asked to monitor a flowerbed or specific wild patch on a
weekly basis to see changes in the pollinators using the plants. If
the pilot is successful the program will be extended to all of Canada.

Jim Dyer is an environmental consultant on climate change and
biodiversity issues in agriculture who lives in Cambridge, Ontario.