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| The WSU Honey bee and Pollinators program is a cornerstone of the College of Agricultural Human and Natural Resource Sciences, abbreviated CAHNRS, that is dedicated to fostering resilient ecosystems in Washington and beyond. Our mission intertwines innovative research, community engagement, and education to safeguard pollinators pivotal to our food security and environmental health. In partnership with CAHNR’s Resilient Washington Initiative, we’re committed to advancing sustainable practices and pollinator-friendly landscapes and ensuring a flourishing future for agriculture and natural resources. We have seven more webinars after this one this year. For more information about those, you can register anytime. Please visit the upcoming events page on our website, bees.wsu.edu. There will be time to answer any questions after the presentation today. Feel free to type your questions in the box below any time during the presentation. After the event and before you close your browser, you should be prompted to answer a short five question education and outreach impact survey. Your participation in this will help us make our outreach and education more tailored to what our attendees are wanting to learn about. Today’s speaker is Dr. Rae Olsson. Dr. Olsson is a scholarly assistant professor at the Washington State University Department of Entomology. This webinar will cover some key changes you can make to your gardening plan to enhance habitat for pollinators, from providing habitat and water to selecting plants and seeds for continuous bloom. It will also go over some brief life cycles of major bee groups and how to accommodate a variety of pollinators in your garden all year round. | Person with brown hair on screen wearing red glasses and a Washington State University Logo in the background. |
Rae: All right. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us for our first webinar today. This is really exciting for us because we have been developing a lot of really informational series webinars in our series. And so I’m honored and only a little bit terrified to be the first presenter today. So I’m going to talk with you about supporting pollinators in your backyard garden. | Title slide shows an image of a green bee on a red flower covered with yellow pollen. Title: Gardening for Pollinators. Supporting pollinators in your backyard garden. Bulleted text reads: Rae Olsson, Ph.D. Scholarly Assistant Professor. Washington State University. |
| A little bit about me. I came to WSU in 2015 to pursue my PhD, working in pollinator ecosystems and pollinator health. Presently, I am teaching in the WSU entomology department. I teach a variety of courses from 100 level sort of science for non-science majors courses. Up into a honey bee biology, general entomology, and I’m also developing new courses for the department in pollination ecology and forensic entomology. I also work very closely with Bri on education and outreach for beekeeping practices in Washington and beyond in English and in Spanish. And so, if you are in Washington in particular, keep an eye on our upcoming events page as well, because we do have some hands-on workshops that we’ll be providing in Western Washington and in our facility in Othello. | Picture of Rae with glasses and smiling, wearing a beekeeping suit. Title: A little about me. Bulleted text reads: WSU since 2015 working on pollinator ecosystems and health, currently teaching in the WSU entomology department, education and outreach for beekeeping practices |
| So to get started, an overview of what we’ll cover today. We’re going to start by just briefly covering the importance of pollinators. I assume if you’re here, you have a good understanding of how important pollinators are. But just to give you that refresher, we’ll also talk a little bit about some of the causes of pollinator declines. We’ll cover some of the various types of pollinators because it’s important to understand who you’re helping in order to best help them. And then lastly, we’ll finish up by talking about how you can help pollinators in your backyard garden. | Image of a dark green metallic bee on a yellow flower. Title: Overview Bulleted text reads: The importance of pollinators, pollinator declines, honey bees, wild bees, other pollinating insects, how you can help pollinators in your garden |
| So pollinators are incredibly important to the food system globally. Insects pollinate one in three bites of food consumed by humans around the world. And they pollinate the tastiest bites, things like fruits, nuts, chocolate, and seeds. Without insect pollinators, we would be living on a pretty bland diet and we would not be able to meet our nutritional requirements from a lot of the foods that we eat. | Image of a honey bee on a pink flower. Title: The importance of pollinators Bulleted text reads: Insects pollinate 1 in 3 bites of food consumed globally Pollinate all the tastiest bites, like fruits, nuts, chocolate, and seeds |
| Of course, it’s been pretty well publicized on the news and through a variety of media outlets that pollinators are suffering global population declines and there isn’t necessarily a single cause for this. They’re really sensitive animals and they suffer from a lot of different issues. But researchers have largely distilled the causes of pollinator declines to what we call the four Ps. Parasites, pathogens. Pesticides, and poor nutrition. | Image of a green bee on a pink and yellow flower. Text reads Pollinator Declines Bulleted text reads: The 4 Ps, parasites, pathogens, pesticides, poor nutrition |
| Parasites and predators, kind of a sneaky extra little P in there can parasitize or harm the animal by either consuming it by you know eating it or by stealing resources from the pollinator Like the example here shown in these mites. These mites are feeding on the hemolymph or sort of the blood of this bumblebee. And parasites can also have the potential to transmit diseases. Some types of parasites might include mites, beetle larvae, wasps or even kleptoparasitic bees that would steal resources from other bees. And some examples of predators might be things like raccoons or bears or even birds that are flying around and eating bees right out of the air. | Image of a bumble bee on a yellow flower, bumble bee has several mites on it. Text reads Parasites (and predators) Bulleted text reads: Mites, beetle larvae, wasps, klepto-parasitic bees |
| Pathogens can be spread from bee to bee in some of the same ways that humans might spread pathogens. They can spread through contact. For example, if a bee is living in a nest with other bees. They can be spread through the nesting material. They can be spread through sexual contact or through contact with a dirty surface. Sort of like how you want to make sure you wash your hands after you touch doorknobs in public places. Bees can transmit diseases by leaving pathogens on flowers, for example, for the next bee to potentially pick up. | Image of a honey bee on yellow flowers. Text reads Pathogens Bulleted text reads: Can be spread in the nest for colony nesting bees, can be spread sexually, can be spread through contact with a “dirty” surface |
Pesticides are another really highly talked about cause of pollinator declines. And most pesticide problems for bees are happening in agricultural settings. Where they’re being applied on a really large scale. But home pesticides can also contribute to individual and colony loss. A couple of years ago, my personal home colonies were killed because a neighbor was using pesticides during floral bloom on one of their trees. And so, we’re going to talk about that a little bit later. Some of the key things to think about when we think about pesticides are that most of them are relatively safe. And as long as the application label is being followed, bees will be somewhat protected. But there’s a lot of different things that go into how a pesticide breaks down in the environment. And there’s a lot of different aspects of pesticide use that can be harmful to pollinators. Most notably, improper application. So, somebody applying a pesticide at a time when they’re not supposed to or at a dosage that is more than the recommended amount. We also have to be careful of systemic pesticides. So that’s a pesticide that moves through the entire plant and can be found in the nectar or the pollen potentially. It’s also really important to think about how much residue a pesticide leaves behind. And whether that residue can eliminate itself in the environment. For example, if someone sprays a pesticide onto a flower and that pesticide residue takes quite a long time to dissipate, a bee might be visiting that flower for a meal and come into contact with the residues there. We also have to think about long-term exposure and short-term exposure. Most pesticides are tested for short-term exposure and then deemed safe because they aren’t killing a bee right in that moment. However, bees, particularly the bees that live in colonies, may be exposed to small doses of pesticides over a very long time, which can affect the overall health of that colony. The LD50 is the term that we use to talk about dosage of a pesticide where the amount of that pesticide is lethal to 50% of the population. And that LD50, again, is a short-term exposure Another thing, again, this is something that you would be really mindful of when reading the pesticide application label. Is to pay really close attention to the amount that’s being applied. Lab exposure rates reflect how toxic that pesticide is. And so it’s really important when you’re in the field or in your personal garden to make sure to adhere really closely to the application label recommendations. And then it’s also very important never to mix pesticides. Because they can have synergistic effects where either one of them on their own might be safe for bees to come into contact with, but when they’re mixed. They could potentially have a detrimental effect by creating an additional effect. | Image of a small black and brown bee walking on soil. Text reads Pesticides Bulleted text reads: Improper application, systemic pesticides, pesticide residues, long term exposure vs short term exposure, LD50, lab exposure rates vs field exposure rates, chemical mixing |
| Poor nutrition is the fourth “P” that we talk about in terms of pollinator declines. And poor nutrition can come from a few different areas. It can come from floral resource loss. Bees depend on flowers in order to feed themselves and their developing young. And so, if an area is developed and a bee loses access to the flowers that were in that area, that can contribute to poor nutrition. A lot of bees also require diverse diets. And so, in agricultural settings, if there’s only one type of flower available, that can be also really challenging for those bees that do require a little bit more diversity in their diet. It would be like trying to survive on nothing but boiled chicken forever. You could probably do it, but you wouldn’t be getting some of the important micronutrients that you need, and you’d probably get kind of bored after a while. Additionally, climate change is causing temporal mismatches with certain pollinator host plants. So that’s kind of a fancy way of saying as we experience climate change, plants respond more to temperature and bees respond more to light. And so, the day length isn’t changing from year to year, but the temperature is. And so, a plant might bloom earlier or later depending on the weather patterns that year. And that kind of earlier or later might be in comparison to when their pollinator would be emerging based on the day length. If that flower emerges early because it’s been a particularly warm spring, but the bees aren’t getting the light indication that says, “hey, it’s time to be flying around”. Then by the time those bees emerge, that flower has already dried up and died. And so, that bee has also lost that potential nutritional opportunity. | Image of a small black bee with light fuzz on a yellow and white flower. Title: Poor Nutrition Bulleted text reads: Floral resource loss due to development and deforestation, monoculture cropping, pollen and nectar laced with pesticides, climate change causing temporal mismatch with host plants |
| So now we’re going to talk about some of the pollinators that can be affected. Because again, as I mentioned, you have to know who you’re helping in order to be able to help them effectively. So, the pollinator that I think most people are generally pretty familiar with are honey bees, Apis mellifera. They’re in the family Apidae. And they are technically in the United States an invasive species. Apis mellifera is not native to North America, but they have been brought here, and they’ve been cultivated and they’re cared for by humans and we really treat them honestly like livestock. Honey bees are a colony nester, so they live in colonies of around 40,000 members. That number can increase or decrease depending on the time of the year, but that’s sort of the average number. And honey bees are highly social. They work together toward common goals, including collecting food. And taking care of the young in the colony. And that’s really important when we start to think about some of those four Ps. Honey bees are generalists. So, they will use floral resources from a wide variety of flower types. And in the United States, around 80% of commercial honey bee colonies are migratory, which means they get moved from their home location, wherever the beekeeper lives or stores them. Around the country in order to pollinate a variety of different crops. That migration can be really stressful for the bees, but it can also be an opportunity for a human to intervene and bring their bees to the resources that the bees need. | Image of a honey bee on a white and yellow flower. Text reads Honey Bees (Apis mellifera) Bulleted text reads: Family: Apidae, Invasive species, Colony nesters, ~40,000 members of a colony, Social, Generalist- they use floral resources from a wide variety of flower types, Around 80% of commercial honey bee colonies are migratory |
| Inside of a honey bee colony you’ll see three different types of bees. The workers, which are shown here on the top. Make up about 98% of the hive members. They have a variety of different jobs. They can be foragers where they’re going out and they’re collecting food for the colony. They might be nurse bees taking care of the developing younger bees. They might be taking care of the queen. They could be cleaning the hive. They could also be scouting for food resources or guarding the nest. The queen, which is here in the middle, is the only reproductive female in the colony. There’s only one queen in a honey bee colony at a time and her only job is to lay eggs and make more bees. Which is why we have workers doing all the other work. They’re taking care of her, they’re feeding her, they’re cleaning up after her, and they’re taking care of those juveniles that she is laying eggs for. We also have the drones. Shown here on the bottom. And these are male honey bees. They will be produced at certain time points during the year, and their goal is to leave the colony and mate with a queen from another colony. They don’t participate in any of the other colony supporting activities. And they aren’t present in the colony year-round, or they aren’t at least present in very high numbers. The sort of fourth unseen in this image group are the larvae or the developing bees. And those are most of the time going to grow up into workers; we refer to them as larvae or brood. But that queen can lay up to 2,500 eggs every single day. So that’s a lot of larvae to be taken care of and looking out for. | Image of three honey bees, shown from the side. On top, a worker bee, in the middle a queen bee, on the bottom, a drone bee. Text reads Honey Bees (Apis mellifera) Bulleted text reads: Workers- make up about 98% of hive members, Foragers, Nurse bees, Queen care, Cleaning, Scouts, Guards, Queen- only reproductive female of the colony, Drones- male honey bees, Larvae/developing bees |
| So as I mentioned, honey bees are part of the Apidae family and honey bees are just one species of bee. There are around 25,000 species of wild bees around the world, and about 6,000 in the United States and 600-ish species in the Pacific Northwest. Apidae is that family that honey bees are in, but there’s a lot of diversity in that family. We also have bumblebees and carpenter bees in that family. As well as a lot of small solitary bees. So, the Apidae family is quite diverse. We can have some larger bodied bees. We can have smaller bodied bees. We might see bees that are completely solitary where they don’t interact or raise their young with any other bees. Most of the bees in this family live in some sort of cavity. Whether that is in a hive, when people are interacting with them, or maybe they’re living in a hole, maybe an abandoned rodent nest, or even in a hollow twig. Apidae carry their pollen on their legs, and most of them are generalists. They are consuming a variety of different types of flowers to raise their young. A fun fact about Apidae is that bumblebees can also make honey. They just don’t make enough of it for humans to harvest it. They don’t make a bunch of extra honey and it tastes a little bit different. | Image of a small black bee on a pink flower. Text reads Apidae Bulleted text reads: Bumble bees, carpenter bees, Solitary, small colonies, Cavity nesting, Solitary to social, Pollen carrying on legs, Most are generalist, Bumble bees also make honey! |
| The next group are the Megachilidae family, the leafcutter bees and the mason bees. So, you may also be familiar with blue orchard bees, wool carter bees, leafcutter bees, mason bees, squash bees, and sunflower bees. This is another group that we do have some human management for some species. These bees are typically cavity nesters and they can be attracted to your garden by placing nesting boxes, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. These bees are kind of what we consider to be gregarious or semi-social, where they’re not necessarily working together to support a single colony. But they might be nesting near each other because the conditions are really suitable. They may also sort of nest near maybe their sisters because that may reduce some of the competition. But again, each female is really provisioning her own nest and taking care of her own young. These bees tend to have really large mandibles, and I will say that it can hurt if they bite you. And one of the interesting things is that many of the leafcutter and mason bees are actually quite specialized. So, they might really rely on one type of flower or maybe one family of flower to provide their pollen resources. Some of them are generalists. But a lot more of them are specialists. So, they’re really relying on a small number of different types of flowers. | Image of a bright yellow and black bee with fuzzy underside on a purple flower. Text reads Leaf cutter bees and mason bees Bulleted text reads: Blue orchard bees, wool carder bees, leafcutter bees, mason bees, squash and sunflower bees, Cavity nesters, “Gregarious” or semi-social, Carry pollen on underside of abdomen, Huge mandibles, Many are specialists, some generalist |
| The next group of bees that we’ll talk about are the Halictidae or the sweat bees. These are smaller bodied bees, and they nest in the ground. They nest in the soil. They generally prefer hard packed soil, hard packed kind of sandy soil. So, if you see small holes in the ground, especially in that kind of hard pack sandy soil with a little tiny mound around the top, it’s likely a halictid nest. A single female will provision her own nest, but similarly to the leafcutter bees, they may exhibit this sort of gregarious or semi-social behavior where some sisters might kind of build their nest around one central opening so that they can share guarding responsibilities. But they aren’t taking care of each other’s offspring the same way that honey bees or some other social bees like bumblebees are. The sweat bees carry their pollen on their legs. They can be small to medium size. Most of the larger sweat bees are still smaller than a honey bee. And some are complete specialists, while again, others might be a little bit more general. | Image of a small green, yellow and black bee on cream colored flowers. Text reads Sweat Bees Bulleted text reads: Ground nesters “Gregarious” or semi-social, Carry pollen on legs, Small to medium size, Some are completely specialists;, others more general |
| The masked bees or the Colletidae, these are a little bit less common, at least in the Pacific Northwest, but we do have them around here. These are also ground nesting bees. And they are solitary. These bees are interesting because they carry their pollen inside their body. So, they swallow the pollen and then they sort of regurgitate it back out kind of like a bird feeding their young rather than carrying their pollen on their legs or on the underside of their abdomen, the way some of the other bees do. And these masked bees again are generally more specialized. So, they really kind of rely on maybe a single type of flower in order to complete their life cycle. | Image of a small black bee with white stripes on a pink flower. Text reads Masked Bees Bulleted text reads: Ground nesters, Solitary, Somewhat uncommon, Carry pollen internally, Can be totally specialist |
| Another really important ground nesting bee are the andrenids or the mining bees. They’re about the size of honey bees, so a little bit of a larger bee, and they carry their pollen on their legs. They tend to be kind of narrow and sort of pointy. And we tend to see them, at least in the Pacific Northwest, a little bit more active in the early part of the spring rather than in the later part of the fall. These mining bees dig really elaborate tunnels, again generally in sort of hard packed sandy soil. And they are entirely solitary. So, you’ll only ever see one single female provisioning her nest. Like I mentioned, they’re early season pollinators, so they’re one of the earlier ones that you start to see once it starts to warm up. And they do tend to kind of specialize on certain flowers, maybe on a flower family rather than a specific species, but they do sort of specialize quite a bit in their dietary needs. | Image of a small, shiny black bee on a light pink flower. Text reads Mining Bees Bulleted text reads: Dig elaborate tunnels, Solitary, Carry pollen on legs, Early season pollinators, Somewhat specialist |
| The last group of bees that we’ll talk about are the oil collecting bees. These are quite uncommon in the Pacific Northwest but they’re quite abundant in the Midwest. We do have them here in the Northwest. And if you want to try to find them, you’d be most likely to find them on flowers in the Aster family. Because they tend to specialize on those flowers. Again, this is another solitary bee. A single female is provisioning her own nest. She’s collecting food for her own offspring. And carrying pollen on her legs to her nest in the ground. | Image of a very fuzzy yellow and black bee on a yellow flower. Text reads Oil Collecting Bees Bulleted text reads: Oil collecting bee, Solitary, Ground nesting, Carry pollen on legs, Specialist |
| So, it’s really important when we’re thinking about how we want to plan our garden to think about the floral visitation networks or the interactions that flowers might be having with our pollinators. Anytime a pollinator touches the pollen producing part of a plant and then touches another plant of the same species, that pollination can occur. This floral visitation network shows that relationship between pollinators and plants in an ecosystem. This is an example, a very simplified example of large areas, so three different large areas where there’s only one type of flower available. And that one flower is really kind of attracting one type of pollinator. This is showing an example of some really specialized relationships between flowers and pollinators. | Image showing three rectangles. In the first rectangle, there is a yellow flower at the top, a grey fly at the bottom, and a two-way arrow between the two. In the second box, there is a pink flower at the top, and black and yellow bee at the bottom, and a two-way arrow between them. In the third box, there is a blue flower at the top, a gold bee at the bottom, and a two way arrow between them. Anytime a pollinator touches the pollen producing part of a plant, Shows the relationships between pollinators and plants in an ecosystem, This is an example of large areas with only one type of flower available attracting one type of pollinator |
| It’s really important to kind of be aware and mindful of that when I mentioned that poor nutrition is a problem for a lot of pollinators. What happens when we have a lot of flowers of just one type, is that if something happens and that flower doesn’t survive, maybe we have a hard frost and that flower is susceptible or they get mown or decimated by development or pesticide, then that pollinator doesn’t have anything else to rely on. It can really provide some limitations for the food resources, especially for the pollinators that do require a broader diet. And in this case, if one of those, you know, if that flower goes away then we’re also going to see the loss of that pollinator. | Image showing same three rectangles. An X appears over the pink flower at the top. Bulleted text reads: Floral visitation networks Really limited food resources for pollinators- no diet breadth, Really limited for plants with only one pollinator type, If one type of flower goes away, then the bee associated goes away |
| Now, thankfully, most landscapes look a little bit more like this. Again, this is still a very simplified version of a pollinator network. But most of the time we have multiple different types of plants within sort of a short radius. And the pollinators there are going to be drawn to a variety of those different plants. There might be a bit of redundancy in the plant and pollinator interactions with some generalist pollinators visiting a variety of the flowers and some specialists who are getting their needs met by the floral resources available. In this example, if any of the flowers were lost, three of the four pollinators would have at least one other food option. If any of the pollinators were lost, there would still be at least one other pollinator to continue pollinating that flower type. This type of functional redundancy is very important for the stability of ecosystems. | Simple diagram of a floral visitation network. One box- 3 flowers: yellow, pink and blue at the top of the box. Four insects: grey fly, black and yellow bee, gold bee, and green bee at the bottom. Two way arrows from yellow flower to fly, black and yellow bee, and gold bee. Two way arrows from pink flower to fly, black and yellow bee, and gold bee. Two way arrows from blue flower to gold bee and green bee. Below, 5 images of insects on flowers: yellow beetle on yellow flower. Black and yellow bumble bee on purple flower. Black and yellow fly on purple flower. Black and yellow fly on pink and yellow flower. Black bumble bee on yellow flower. |
| I do really want to point out this special relationship here. This green bee in our example is a specialist. It’s only using this blue flower. And it’s important to think about that because if that blue flower were to disappear, then that green bee would be left without a food source, and we would lose that bee. So this has been really sort of general simplified versions of plant–pollinator networks. | *Animation removes all insects, flowers, and arrows except the blue flower, the green bee, and the arrow between them, highlighting the relationship between this insect and flower. |
| This is an example of a more complicated pollinator network. So let me just give you just a brief overview on how to read this figure. These black lines and boxes across the top are a variety of different insects that were seen visiting flowers in a research study that I did during my PhD. On the bottom, we have all of the different types of flowers that were observed being visited by pollinators. And then the lines in between the pollinator and the plant show the frequency of those pollinators visiting that specific type of plant. You can kind of look and see, for example, this wild mustard here, this largest black box on the bottom, is being visited by kind of these gray lines that are being connected, a lot of different pollinators. Whereas down here lines are really only being pollinated maybe by one or two different things. One of the things that I really want to point out here is that bees are not the only thing pollinating. Remember how I mentioned that anything that touches the pollen part of the plant and then touches another plant of the same species can be a pollinator? What we see here is that flies actually make up almost a third of the visits to these variety of different plants. And we also had visits from dragonflies, other bugs, beetles, wasps, ants, butterflies, lacewings, etc. | The figure is a bipartite interaction network showing relationships between two groups: Top row: different insect taxa (pollinators and other flower‑visiting arthropods) Bottom row: various plant species Lines connect insects to the plants they visit, forming a web of ecological interactions. |
| So it’s important to remember that while bees are the best and most effective pollinators, they’re not the only pollinators that might be visiting your gardens. In particular, some of the flies, in particular the ones that mimic bees, these syrphid flies or hoverflies, can be really excellent pollinators. And as juveniles, these flies are also great aphid predators. So these are really good friends to have around in your garden. Certain types of wasps, which wasps get kind of a bad name, but most wasps are also solitary, they’re non-aggressive, and they may be providing pest control in your garden so they can also contribute really well. Certain types of beetles may be pollinating; it’s going to be a little bit more accidental. And depending on the type of beetle, it might also be a pest. So, you know, certainly something to keep an eye out. But they could also, again, like the ladybugs might be providing some pest control. Again, anything that touches a pollen structure and moves it to another flower can be a pollinator, including you. | Five images of insects on flowers: black and yellow fly on a small yellow flower. Red wasp on white flowers. Black and yellow fly on a pink and yellow flower. Black and yellow fly on a purple flower. Yellow beetle on a yellow flower. Title: Other pollinating organisms Bulleted text reads: Flies, Wasps, Beetles, Butterflies, Anything that touches a pollen structure and moves it to another pollen structure – Maybe even you! |
| Now we’ll talk about how you can help support pollinators. We talked about those four Ps, parasites, pathogens, pesticides, and poor nutrition. But there is sort of this secret fifth P, which is people and how people interact with pollinators can be really important in how well those pollinator populations are doing in our ecosystems. | Image of a green and black bee on a sunflower. Title: Supporting Pollinators- How you can help Bulleted text reads: The 4 Ps, Parasites, Pathogens, Pesticides, Poor nutrition, The 5th P- People |
| But we can take care of any pollinators that we are providing a nesting source for. If you keep honey bees, make sure that you’re monitoring closely and frequently for parasites. And treat your hive with approved treatment methods. If you are providing nesting materials like bee hotels for mason bees, make sure that you keep and clean them properly every year to reduce parasites. | Image of honey bees on beeswax frame. Title: Supporting pollinators- parasites Bulleted text reads: If you keep honey bees, monitor closely and frequently for parasites, and treat hive with approved treatment methods If you provide nesting materials like bee hotels, make sure you keep and clean them properly each year to reduce parasites |
| So, for parasites, for some of the solitary pollinators, there’s not a lot that we can do, unfortunately. Similarly, with pathogens, again, there’s not necessarily a ton that we can do for pathogens on some of those solitary bees. But because they’re solitary, they’re a lot less susceptible to catching pathogens and sharing it among the nests. Because again, they’re solitary, they’re living and working alone. So again, the impact that humans can have on supporting pollinators in the case of pathogens is really on those pollinators that humans are keeping and caring for. If you keep honey bees or if you place nesting boxes for bumblebees or mason bees or those blue orchard bees, make sure to clean out the boxes at least once a year. Cleaning out those habitats will reduce the amount of parasites and pathogens in the environment and reduce the amount that could be spilled over and onto other pollinator populations. | Image of a teardrop shaped bee hotel filled with cardboard tubes hanging in a tree. Title: Supporting pollinators: pathogens Bulleted text reads: If you keep honey bees or you place nesting boxes for bumble bees or mason bees, be sure to clean out the boxes at least once a year, Cleaning out the habitats will reduce parasites and pathogens |
| If you’re interested in mason bees and how to take care of them, we have an awesome video that Bri, our lovely host, did alongside with Rent Mason Bees. They went over how to take care of your mason bees all year long, how to choose a correct nest box, how to clean the nesting materials and how to care for those bees. So you can find that on our YouTube channel or through our website. | Screenshot from video on Mason Bees by WSU Bee Program showing two women talking to each other. Title: Mason Bees. Bulleted text reads: Check out this informational video by the WSU Bee Program and Rent Mason Bees for more information and keeping mason bees safely! Video titled: How to care for your mason bees all year long |
| Okay, so when we’re talking about supporting pollinators and pesticides. There are a few things that you can do as a home gardener. The first one is to reduce pesticide applications overall. Even organic pesticides can be quite harmful to pollinators, especially if they’re not applied correctly. When you are applying a pesticide, be careful to follow all of the application labeling rules. And if you have to spray a pesticide, apply it during the evening, when bees aren’t flying. This can be really important to make sure that even if you’re applying something that’s not an insecticide, which would kill insects, if you’re applying a pesticide, for example, an herbicide to kill weeds, some of those herbicides can have some long-term effects on your pollinator’s behavior and their ability to learn and forage. Spraying during the evening when bees aren’t flying and that pesticide has a long period overnight before those bees are going to be coming back to the flowers will significantly reduce the likelihood that the bees will have a toxic reaction. | Image of black and yellow bee on blue flower. Title: Supporting pollinators- Pesticides. Bulleted text reads: Reduce pesticide applications (even organic) Follow all pesticide application labels If you have to spray, apply during the evening when bees aren’t flying |
| There are a couple of things that we can really do to encourage the nutrition. And I would say, aside from making sure that you’re keeping your pollinator habitats clean and as free of parasites and pathogens as possible and making sure that you are following all labeling recommendations for pesticides, providing nutrition is probably the easiest and most fun way to support pollinators by providing nutrition. So, you know, you heard me talk about a lot of different types of pollinators and their nutritional needs. We know that pollinators can be generalists where they need a lot of different types of flowers. Or they can be specialists and they really need one or two specific types of flowers in order to complete their life cycle. And so the way for you as an individual to really have the largest impact on pollinator nutrition is to plant a lot of different kinds of flowers in your garden. You want to make sure that flowers of different sizes and shapes are available because research has shown that pollinators, along with maybe requiring a certain type of flower to kind of fulfill their life cycle, may also just be attracted to a specific type of flower shape or color. Another thing that you want to be aware of is to make sure that there is some kind of flower blooming at all times during the spring, the summer, and the fall when pollinators are active. So that even if one type of flower has stopped blooming, there’s still other options for bees to find floral resources in your space. And then just like humans need water, bees also need water. So providing some water in a shallow tin can also be really helpful. And I’ve got some examples, some photo examples, of how to do that in a later slide. | Image of honey bee on small white flowers. Title: Supporting pollinators- poor nutrition Bulleted text reads: Plant lots of different kinds of flowers in your garden, Ensure flowers of different sizes and shapes are available, Make sure there is some kind of flower blooming at all times during spring, summer, and fall, Provide water in a shallow tin for bees |
| So if you’re thinking about what you want to plant and how to have a lot of different blooms happening kind of over the course of the summer, there’s a lot of different resources for how to make those decisions. This is an example of a bloom calendar for bulbs, which can give you an idea of when to expect flowers to bloom based on what season the bulbs were planted. This is from Eden Brothers. And you can see kind of up top here, they have this group here are all the fall planted bulbs and this is sort of when to expect them to bloom. And then on the right side, we have the spring planted bulbs and then when you might expect them to bloom in that same year. And so, you know, being mindful of being mindful of if you want to have blooms throughout the year, that might mean that you need to plant a lot of different types of bulbs. But if that’s not financially available to you you might choose, you don’t have to necessarily buy bulbs of every single type here, but you would maybe want to try to focus on getting one from each sort of category to really just allow pollinators to have access to something all year round. | The image is an illustrated gardening chart from Eden Brothers titled “The Seediest Place on Earth.” It visually organizes a variety of flowering plants by bloom time, height, and planting season (fall-planted vs. spring-planted bulbs). The chart is arranged horizontally like a timeline, moving from Early Spring on the left to Summer Through Fall on the right. Along the bottom, each plant is shown with a cross‑section of its bulb or root, plus how deeply it should be planted (with mulch level indicated). Each plant is illustrated in color aboveground, with corresponding root/bulb beneath. |
| This is another example from Oregon State University of flowering timetables for native insect pollinators and this timetable is specific to the Southern Willamette Valley. We do have resources like this for the different counties in Washington State as well. And so again, you can kind of see here that based on the botanical name, the common name, you know, and then these color codes are actually related to the color of the bloom that you might expect when these plants might be blooming between March and September. So this is just another way of kind of looking at that information. And again, you can divide it up if having this entire list of plants seems a little overwhelming, you can try to choose one that’s going to be blooming in March. This bleeding heart is going to be blooming for a really long time. So that one looks really attractive to me because I only have to have one of these and I would have, you know, blooms from March all the way through June. And then I would maybe choose something that is blooming in kind of mid‑June to July and so you can really kind of pick and choose. And anything that you do in your garden is going to be helpful for the pollinators in your area. | Title: Example of bloom times and floral colors spanning the calendar when planted in the Willamette Valley region of Oregon The image is a large, data‑dense chart titled: “Flowering Timetable of Native Plants for Native Insect Pollinators in the Southern Willamette Valley, Oregon.” It is organized as a matrix-style calendar, with plant species listed vertically on the left and the months March through September represented in columns across the top. The chart is designed to show flowering periods for each species, specifically to help gardeners support native pollinators throughout the growing season. |
| Here’s an example for kind of a garden calendar. So this would be more of the garden tasks if your brain kind of works well in what to do and when. This is an extension sheet for the Chelan and Douglas counties region in Washington state. And again, these types of calendars can really give you a good idea of what kind of effort will be important to maintain your garden. Which again, can be really important in the decisions that you make about how to plan your garden. If you’re looking at the calendar and you see that March is going to really require you to be in the garden for a lot of time. And you also know that your work schedule in March is typically really busy, you might want to make a different decision as to how you want to approach your garden. Maybe you would choose simple plantings in the fall so that they can be blooming in the spring and you can have a little bit of a lower maintenance experience in your garden. | A screenshot from the : Garden Tasks Calendar from WSU Extension Chelan and Douglas Counties Title: A different format for garden calendar This has the “what to do and when to do it” guidance which can help you determine the effort needed to maintain your pollinator garden |
| So these are just some examples of resources where you can find this information. And I know that we have participants today, not just from Washington State. We’ve got folks from all around the country and I think I even saw a couple of international folks. So, these resources can be applied to your area, I always recommend looking into your university extension and Master Gardeners for your county. Washington State University is the land grant university for Washington, which means we have a presence in every county in Washington State. And although there might not be a master gardener program in every county, every county has an extension office who can direct you toward these resources. A lot of areas will also have conservation districts. They’re going to be focused more on kind of maintaining the native plants and landscape of that area. And that can be really helpful because native plants will attract the native pollinators much better than non‑native plants. So native plant societies, if you have a native plant society in your region, that can also be a great resource. A lot of native plant societies will also provide recommendations for perennial plants, so things that you can plant that will continue to bloom year after year, which again would reduce the overall sort of human interaction and kind of requirement on your effort, if that’s something that makes you feel a little bit nervous. Local nurseries and seed companies can also be great resources. They do have a vested interest in you purchasing their products. But a lot of nurseries and seed companies do a lot of public education. And even on their websites, without being a customer, you can find a lot of these resources. Because they really do want to make sure that people understand what it takes to grow and get the best quality out of the product that they’re providing. Finding a seed company that is relatively regional to where you live can also be really helpful because you’re more likely to find native seeds and seeds that will grow really well in your climate. And then, you know, last but not least, look around at your neighbor’s gardens. If you have a neighbor with a beautiful garden, I can almost guarantee they would love to talk to you about it. And if you were to ask them questions about their gardens and where they got their seeds and what kind of effort goes into their garden, I’m sure they would be more than happy to share some of that very useful knowledge. So the people all around us are incredible resources for knowledge and information. And I feel like most people who like gardening are always very happy to talk about their garden and help other people have beautiful gardens. | An image of a flower garden with a variety of different colored and shaped flowers. Text reads Resources Bulleted text reads: University Extension and Master Gardeners for your county, Conservation districts for your region, Native plant societies for your region, Local nurseries and seed companies, Your neighbors with beautiful gardens! |
| So the USDA growing zones, if you’re not familiar with this map, this is a plant hardiness zone map. And what this map shows are sort of the zones where certain plants will grow and thrive in. It’s really important to select plants that will grow and thrive in your hardiness zone. Because if you’re choosing something, for example, that’s really going to do well in like Southern California with long kind of warm days and really mild winters. But you’re trying to plant that plant in Montana. There’s a really good chance it’s not going to survive or even grow. So, if you are looking at resources, if you’re looking for resources from seed companies or conservation districts. If you don’t have those resources that are directly in your region. You can find those resources from other regions as long as they’re still in that kind of same plant hardiness zone. So, me being in Washington, you can sort of see in eastern Washington, we’ve got kind of a medium green color. So I might look, if I couldn’t find information for my region, which in the Palouse part of eastern Washington where I live, we do have a lot of great conservation districts and resources, but if I couldn’t find that information, I might look at somewhere here in the Midwest that has that same kind of color for that plant hardiness zone. Maybe there’s a region that has a lot of that information available. Even if it’s not native to me, they might still have some recommendations on plants that would grow in my area. And again, as I mentioned, it is best to choose plants that are native to your area because pollinators don’t generally fly very far. And so providing native plants will best support your native pollinators. But again, if that’s not available to you, planting something can still be better than nothing. | An image showing a heat map of the United States demonstrating the USDA Plant Hardiness Zones. Title: USDA growing zones Bulleted text reads: You can use guidance for your own garden from any resource that is in the same plant hardiness zone map, Best to choose plants native to your area for best pollinator support |
| Okay, so I’ve covered a lot of material and I know it can be a lot to take all of that material and try to like to change your entire garden plan all at once. So, I want everybody to just take a breath, [pause] and remember that even small changes that you make to your garden can make a really big difference for the pollinators in your area. If trying to think about planting calendars, native seeds, and pesticides and pathogens and parasites and nesting habitats and all of the other things that we’ve talked about today feel like a little bit too much. I’m going to give you two things that you can do to make a huge difference. | An image of a succulent. Title: Feeling overwhelmed? Bulleted text reads: We’ve covered a lot of material and it can be a lot to take it and change all at once, Even small changes can make a big difference for pollinators in your garden If planting calendars and native seeds and pesticides and pathogens and parasites and nesting habitats and all the other things feel like a little much… Try these two things. |
| The first one is to plant a variety of flower shapes, colors, and sizes. Try choosing three different shape, color, size combinations and just plant those. A small pop of color might be just the thing to signal to the pollinators nearby that your garden is a place they can come and visit for food and nesting. | Six images of insects on flowers: honey bee on yellow flower, black bee on pink flower, red wasp on white flower, honey bee on white flower, honey bee on pink flower, green bee on red and yellow flower. Title: Plant a variety of flower shapes, colors, and sizes. |
| Provide water. Just like every other animal, pollinators need water to help regulating their temperature. So, providing access to fresh, clean water can give pollinators that extra hydration that they need to do their work. And these images are some examples of how you can provide that water. You can do a shallow dish with some marbles in it so that the bees can walk on the marbles and collect that water without falling in and drowning. There are some mason jar waterers that provide the water in a really shallow dish. There are these other sorts of bee‑specific waters that have these kind of little islands so that this lower part fills up and then the bees are able to kind of walk on these raised areas so that they don’t fall in and drown. | Five images of different watering dispensers for bees. Title: Provide water for visiting bees. |
| As a person, you can also support that fifth P, the people. By learning about bees and pollinators and watching them in your garden. It can be very meditative to sit in your garden near some flowers and watch the bees visit, you might be surprised at how many different types of pollinators are visiting your space. I know before I started the work that I’ve done with bees, I had no idea that we had these little shiny green bees in Washington State but they are everywhere. They’re just really small and they move really quickly. So I didn’t really notice them until I really sat down and just spent some time watching and observing them. Tell your friends about bees and pollinators. Share the information that you learned in this webinar. Share the link once we get it posted on our YouTube page and really just enjoy the presence of the pollinators in our lives; caring for our environment and caring for these animals in our environment can really allow us to experience our homes in a very different way and really give us an opportunity to just be grateful for how rich and abundant the animal life is just right outside in our backyards. | Close up picture of Rae kissing a bumble bee. Title: Supporting pollinators- People. Bulleted text reads: Learn about bees Watch them in your garden Teach your friends about bees Enjoy their presence in our lives! |
| With that, I will thank you again so much for attending today. And I will answer any questions that you have. | Image of Rae as a 10-year old child holding a butterfly. Title: Thank you! Contact Information: Rae.olsson@wsu.edu |
| Rae: I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing. Bri: Thank you, Rae. That was a great presentation. We did have a couple of questions asking a little bit more about, and maybe you answered them as you were advancing, but where to find certain resources about those like floral color charts. Rae: Yeah, so the floral color charts, I would start by searching for floral color charts for pollinators with your county. If you can’t find something in your county, try to find a nearby county. I see, you know, we’ve got the bloom time and floral color spanning calendar in Stevens County is going to look really different from Skagit County, is going to look really different from Thurston County, right? Washington State has such variable climate conditions in really small, really small microclimates. That it can be really hard to have sort of like a broad Washington state flower timetable. There are seed companies that make those bloom tables that are specific to Western Washington or Eastern Washington. So, my best recommendation is to try to find something that’s as close to where you live as possible. And if you can’t find anything there, then try to find something that has that same USDA plant hardiness region. Any advice on how to avoid seeds treated with neonicotinoids? Yeah, that’s a great question. As of right now, organic seeds cannot be treated with neonicotinoids. So, if that’s something that you are really trying to avoid, going organic would be your best option. There are some companies that are not necessarily growing organic, but they will label their seed packets that they are free of neonicotinoids. So just be careful about reading the seed packets. And if you really want to be sure that they’re free of neonics, go for organic seeds. We do have a YouTube page. You can search for the YouTube page by searching WSU Bee Program. And you can also find a link to it on the bees.wsu.edu website. All right, we’ve got a question about what do I think of honey bees being in competition with native bees? So yeah, that is a really great question. And as I mentioned kind of early on, honey bees are technically considered an invasive species here in so far as they were introduced by humans. They are not native here. And because of the way that we manage honey bees, depending on the location, they can out-compete just because of the sheer number of honey bees in a location. So they might be overwhelming an area for food availability. And if there are native bees in an area, it’s possible that honey bees are competing. One of the things I think is really fascinating about bees and bee ecology is that bees are pretty good at adapting to kind of fill a specific niche. So honey bees might be out and pollinating everything in an area. But there’s also, you know, if a bee is a smaller bee, they might visit the smaller flowers. Or a larger bee might visit flowers that are higher up, maybe in a tree. Because their larger bodies can allow them to resist the wind in those higher areas a bit more. And so bees are pretty good at adapting to having a lot of other animals nearby. And, you know, beekeepers do a pretty good job of kind of assessing how many bees it’s appropriate to have in a location. And I know all the beekeepers that I’ve talked to are paying close attention to making sure that they’re not overwhelming their environment. Many garden catalogs offer pollen-free sunflower seeds. Will they provide nutrition that bees need? So no, that is a great question. So sometimes the garden catalogs will offer those pollen free sunflower seeds where the flowers aren’t creating pollen, because sunflowers can produce a lot of pollen. It can kind of overwhelm somebody’s area if somebody has allergies that can contribute pretty badly. So the pollen, if the flower doesn’t have any pollen, then the bees cannot collect any pollen. So no, they would not provide that nutrition. Rosemarie says, I had a large digger bee colony housed in a backyard ground. They didn’t come back next year, but don’t know why. We don’t use any pesticides. It’s possible that the next year when the juveniles hatched, they dispersed because they were trying not to compete with their sisters. Digger bees are solitary, so they don’t necessarily tend to stay in the nest that they were raised in. So, they actually, on purpose, will try to leave the area so that they’re not competing with their sisters. So it’s not your fault – they just move around. My neighbors have chickens and they hang traps for the flies. I worry they trap sweat bees that look like flies. Do you have an alternate that I can suggest to my neighbors to protect the bees and wasps? Christine, that’s a great question. And actually, sweat bees are not attracted to these fly traps. The fly traps have a specific scent in them that’s really attractive to flies. But it would not be attractive to the sweat bee. So, it’s not attracting things based on what they look like. It’s attracting them based on what they smell like and what that animal will eat. Those fly traps usually smell like either dung or carrion, something dead. Because those flies would be attracted, you know, they’re attracted to the chicken dung. And so the scent lure in those traps is probably mostly going to smell like dung, which the bees are not attracted to. Is a yellow jacket considered a pollinator? Yellowjacket can be a pollinator if it lands on the pollen structure of a flower and then lands on another flower of the same type. Yellowjackets aren’t pollinating on purpose. They aren’t collecting pollen. Yellowjackets will visit flowers because the adults consume nectar the same way that bees do as adults. But the difference is to feed their young, yellowjackets are going to be collecting animal protein of some sort, usually other insects or maybe, you know, pieces of your burger from your picnic or your barbecue. So they’re not collecting pollen. So any pollination that a yellowjacket might do would be sort of accidental. Bri: I have some other resources to add as well. I’ve been listening to some talks from this person, and when someone asked that question about native pollinators and honey bees competition, I found a YouTube video to share. So, Dr. Diana Cox-Foster with the Logan Bee Lab has looked very extensively into this. So, I’m going to link a YouTube video in the chat with her talking to another group, Michigan State University. And what she was finding was that competition occurs if carrying capacity is exceeded in an environment, and she also looks into foraging behavior differences and pathogen transfers. So, if you’re interested in learning more about that, you can go to that video. Rae: Make sure to grab that link before the webinar ends because it will disappear when we close the webinar. So if you are interested, make sure to click that link and get that open. Bri: And I also could put this link in the YouTube channel description too in case people are watching it later on and want to access it. And another resource I wanted to add was I know the garden ecology lab at Oregon State University has done a lot of work on defining native plants and how to pick native plants. And so I’m going to put some information or some links in the chat as well for if you’re interested in trying to tailor your garden to more native plants, if you can do that. Are there any more questions before we close the webinar? [Pause]. Okay, well, thank you all for attending. As a reminder, we have seven more webinars planned for this year. For more information about those and to register, you can go to our upcoming events page on our Bee Program website. Bees.wsu.edu. All the webinars in this series will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel @WSUBeeProgram. Before you close your browser, you should be prompted for a short five question survey about education and outreach impact. This will help us tailor our outreach events to what you want to learn. And please let me know if it doesn’t work that way because this is the first time we’re using the Zoom webinar function. So, if you don’t get that survey prompted right after I close the meeting, I’ll email it to everyone. Thank you. | As Rae and Bri talk, view alternates to show them. Rae and Bri are in office settings talking to a webcam. |