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Outdoor Plants That Reduce Air Pollution

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Air quality is more important now than ever. Click here to learn how to lower your AQI with your garden.

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The need for bees

We need bees. We may take them and other pollinators like butterflies and hoverflies for granted, but they're vital to stable, healthy food supplies and key to the varied, colourful and nutritious diets we need (and have come to expect).

Bees are perfectly adapted to pollinate, helping plants grow, breed and produce food. They do so by transferring pollen between flowering plants and therefore keeping the cycle of life turning.

The vast majority of plants we need for food rely on pollination, especially by bees: from almonds and vanilla to apples and squash. Bees also pollinate around 80% of wildflowers in Europe, so our countryside would be far less interesting and beautiful without them.

But bees are in trouble. There's growing public and political concern at bee decline across the world. This decline is caused by a combination of stresses - from loss of habitat and food sources to exposure to pesticides and the effects of climate breakdown.

More than ever before, we need to recognise the importance of bees to nature and to our lives. And we need to turn that into action to ensure they don't just survive but thrive.

Types of bee

Not all bees are the same. There are over 20,000 known species of bee globally. Around 270 species of bee have been recorded in the UK. Only 1 of these is the famous Honeybee.

Most Honeybees are kept by beekeepers in colonies of managed hives. The rest of our bees are wild, including 25 bumblebee species and more than 220 types of solitary bee.

Like Honeybees, the familiar Bumblebees live in social colonies - usually in holes in the ground or tree cavities.

Solitary bees tend to nest on their own, as the name suggests. Each female builds and provisions her own nest with food. Solitary bees include Mining bees which nest in the ground, as well as Mason bees and Leafcutter bees that nest in holes in dead wood, banks and walls.

Learn more with our bee identification guide.

Bees = perfect pollinators

Thanks to bees we can enjoy a range of foods from apples and pears to coffee and vanilla. And if you are wearing cotton, that's because the cotton plant your threads came from was pollinated.

"More than 90% of the leading global crop types are visited by bees."

Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

Bees gather pollen to stock their nests as food for their young. They have special features to collect it - like branched hairs called 'scopae' or combs of bristles called pollen baskets on their legs. As bees visit plants seeking food, pollen catches on their bodies and passes between plants, fertilising them - that's pollination.

Bees are not the world's only pollinators. Flies, wasps, moths, beetles and even some birds, bats and lizards all pollinate, but they only visit flowers enough to feed themselves. Because they gather pollen to stock their nests, bees are generally the most effective pollinators since they visit many more flowers and carry more pollen between them.

Some bee species are also specially developed to pollinate particular plants and without them those plants would be less well-pollinated.

Bees and farmers

Many bees have different characteristics that make them suited to pollinate certain plants. For example, the Early bumblebee's small size and agility allow it to enter plants with drooping flowers such as comfrey. Garden bumblebees are better at pollinating the deep flowers of honeysuckle and foxgloves than most other species because their longer tongue can reach deep inside them.

Many farmers rely on a diversity of bees to pollinate their produce. For example, commercial apple growers benefit from the free pollination services of the Red mason bee. This species can be 120 times more efficient at pollinating apple blossoms than honeybees.

There is evidence that natural pollination by the right type of bee improves the quality of the crop - from its nutritional value to its shelf life. For example, bumblebees and solitary bees feed from different parts of strawberry flowers. In combination they produce bigger, juicier and more evenly-shaped strawberries.

Some bee species have an affinity to particular plants, so need particular natural habitats. For example, in the UK the scabious bee, our largest mining bee, needs the pollen of field scabious or small scabious to provision its young. These plants grow on sandy or chalky open grassland, an important habitat for a variety of bees and wildflowers that is under threat from changing land use. The loss of particular habitats like this is the main driver of bee decline.

Bees are important for more than honey

In a world without bees we would probably survive. But our existence would be more precarious and our diets would be dull, poorer and less nutritious. And not just for want of honey.

Even some plants grown to feed to livestock for meat production, such as clover and alfalfa, depend at least partly on bee pollination.

"Loss of pollinators could lead to lower availability of crops and wild plants that provide essential micro-nutrients for human diets, impacting health and nutritional security and risking increased numbers of people suffering from vitamin A, iron and folate deficiency."

Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

Governments and food producers talk a lot about food security, yet without bees our food supply would be insecure. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) identified encouraging pollinators - particularly bees - as one of the best sustainable ways to boost food security and support sustainable farming.

All this natural crop pollination fills pockets as well as our bellies. The global market value linked to pollinators is between US$235bn and US$557bn each year. In the UK alone, the services of bees and other pollinators are worth £691m a year, in terms of the value of the crops they pollinate. It would cost the UK at least £1.8bn a year to employ people to do the work of these pollinators, yet bees do it for free.

Bees are important to a healthy environment

Bees are a fantastic symbol of nature. That they are in trouble is a sign that our natural environment is not in the good shape it should be.

By keeping the cycle of life turning, bees boost the colour and beauty of our countryside. Some 80% of European wildflowers require insect pollination. Many of them such as foxglove, clovers and vetches rely on bees.

Pollinators allow plants to fruit, set seed and breed. This in turn provides food and habitat for a range of other creatures. So the health of our natural ecosystems is fundamentally linked to the health of our bees and other pollinators.

Maintaining our native flora also depends on healthy pollinator populations. This includes wild flowers such as poppies, cornflowers and bluebells, as well as trees and shrubs. The close relationship between pollinators and the plants they pollinate is evident in the parallel declines seen across the UK and Europe: 76% of plants preferred by bumblebees have declined in recent decades, with 71% seeing contractions in their geographical range.

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Why do we need bees? | Friends of the Earth

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Bees are vital to a healthy environment and healthy economy. They're also simply beautiful and fascinating little insects. But what makes them so special?

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Easy Ways to Attract More Bees to Your Garden

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Every garden needs pollinators and bees are among the best. Without them, there would be limited flowers and even fewer fruits and vegetables. Since bees add more than a soothing buzzing sound, it's worth putting some thought into making your garden inviting for them.

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Your Garden Can Quietly Help The Planet In 10 Specific Ways

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Wanna save the world? Good. Grab your sun hat.

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One summer night in 2014, a group of biologists and ecologists staked out several streetlamp-lit suburban areas just outside Wallingford in the UK. While their nighttime presence may have prompted some concern of potential thievery among the locals, they were actually there to observe nocturnal moths going about their nightly pollinating routine.

Sure enough, of the hundreds of moths they observed, over 70% were drawn upwards towards the lights and away from the flowering plants, resulting in a noticeable reduction in plant pollination as well as the number of pollen types that were transported by the moths. This proved true across several different nocturnal moth species and over 28 varieties of plants, meaning the ripple effect could have wide-reaching consequences.

This is just one narrow view into how light pollution is disrupting the natural world. Moths aren't the only pollinators impacted by dazzling city lights. Bees are also feeling the effects, along with all the plants they pollinate. As artificial lights disrupt how nocturnal pollinators interact with plants, their pollen output can be affected, which may, in turn, impact how well bees and other diurnal pollinators can fertilise them during the daytime.
How plants sense the world
A primary reason light pollution, or artificial light at night, impacts most living things on this planet is that they have a circadian rhythm. This rhythm is the natural sleep-wake cycle that repeats every 24 hours and is governed by when it's light or dark. Most creatures, whether nocturnal or diurnal, carry out their living processes by this cycle, so when it is disrupted by, say, a perceived shorter nighttime, it can put undue stress on how internal systems function. And the longer that disruption goes on, the more potential there is for detrimental impacts.

Light pollution is negatively impacting many different species, including bumblebees (Credit: Getty Images)

SENSORY OVERLOAD

From the microplastics sprayed on farmland to the noxious odours released by sewage plants and the noise harming marine life, pollutants are seeping into every aspect of our existence. Sensory Overload explores the impact of pollution on all our senses and the long-term harm it is inflicting on humans and the natural world. Read some of the other stories from the series here:

Circadian clock disruptions can also affect regulating chemicals in humans, plants and animals, most notably melatonin, a molecule that is produced in response to darkness and helps regulate the circadian rhythm. "[It's] supposed to be elevated overnight, but light pollution suppresses melatonin, which, over time, can cause a whole sweep of negative health effects," says Valentina Alaasam, a researcher at the University of Nevada in the US. For humans, health impacts include an increased risk of sleep disorders, diabetes, depression, heart conditions, and breast cancer.

The effects aren't all that dissimilar to jet lag. Say you're flying from London to New York. Since you're traveling to a place five hours behind your home base, you're effectively gaining five hours of either day or night (depending on when you're travelling), which throws your circadian rhythm off kilter. The resulting jet lag can leave you feeling foggy, sleep-deprived, and generally under the weather for several days. That's just the result of one circadian rhythm disruption. Now imagine you're a tree on the side of a city street constantly being exposed to artificial lights from street lamps, cars, and buildings. If your internal system always thinks it's daytime, it can turn your life upside down.

"Plants are like animals in that they need a sleep cycle to process stuff, and what they do is they put attention on different activities at different times of the day. So they need to know the time of day," says Joanne Chory, professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California.

Plants have photoreceptors, 13 that we know of, that they use to determine things like day length. This helps them know when to bloom and, for deciduous trees, when to drop leaves - arguably two of the most important events in a tree's calendar. Five of the photoreceptors absorb near-infrared light from the Moon and starlight, and eight absorb a type of UV light. By artificially extending the length of the day, light pollution can trigger these photoreceptors to the point where a plant's flowering pattern changes.

"Plants will get stressed out under [artificial] light. They can photosynthesise more, and because they are there's more stress," says Brett Seymoure, an ecologist and assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso. "It's just like a bodybuilder who's just always working out." When a plant photosynthesises, they're taking in energy, and if they're doing that all the time, it can be overwhelming and create a reactive type of oxygen that kills the plant.

Couple that with warmer winters and longer summers due to climate change, and you end up with trees growing well out of their natural rhythm, which can ultimately weaken them.
Seasonal changes
Blooming or budbursts typically happen in the spring with the arrival of warmer temperatures coinciding with longer days and more UV rays. However, Seymour says light pollution is scrambling those cues for plants. "The seasonal changes of plants have been affected by artificial light at night," says Seymoure. "They do budbursts sooner or they hold onto their leaves longer, and that's because the photoperiod, which is the ratio of daytime to nighttime, is being masked by artificial light at night."

Even ambient light that radiates miles out from a city can disrupt the circadian rhythms of plants and animals (Credit: Fabrice-Coffrini / Getty Images)

One study that analysed 13 years of budburst data from deciduous trees in the UK found that budburst happened up to 7.5 days earlier in areas that were brighter at night due to light pollution. Budburst can also change when trees drop their leaves in the autumn because, again, artificial light interferes with the perceived photoperiod of shortening days as winter approaches.

Normally, as days grow shorter, deciduous trees stop the production of chlorophyll, the primary pigment used in photosynthesis, and pull nutrients out of their leaves, which is why they change colour and eventually fall to the ground. "But since they're just constantly bombarded by street lights, they don't get that photoperiod, so they're going to hold on to their leaves a lot longer, and they could lose all those leaves that have this chlorophyll which is actually very energetically costly," says Seymoure.
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Light pollution even impacts migration by attracting insects (and other flying animal species) away from their natural, intended path and into dangerous and often deadly scenarios. "[It] has been shown to disorient [bird] migration routes and change where species breed or overwinter," says Alaasam. These migratory changes can potentially impact plants that are pollinated by birds or plants that get their seeds dispersed by birds.

What can humans do to mitigate light pollution?

There are simple steps we can all take to reduce light pollution, and many of the positive effects are instantaneous.

Switch to LED bulbs, which, aside from causing less light pollution than halogen lights, are more energy-efficient. Make sure you're using ones with warm light rather than cool (up to 3000K - the higher the K value, the cooler the light).

Get rid of flood lighting - it casts too much light into the air, which can disorient birds and cause them to fly into structures or get lost.

Draw your curtains at night, or install shades over your outside lighting.

Install motion-sensor lights rather than timer lights.

In terms of insects, Seymoure calls this attraction to light the " trap effect" which is "where the insects come to the lights but they never pollinate because they're just too busy flying around in the light," says Seymoure. Other pollinators, such as certain species of beetles, are photophobic, and simply avoid vegetation under artificial light; this is the "repel effect". Around one-third of bugs that are attracted to artificial light at night don't survive past the morning, according to a review of 229 studies Seymoure co-authored, either due to predation, exhaustion, or hunger.

' Insect apocalypse'

Pollinator populations are steadily declining, and ecologists like Seymoure fear it's the result of a confluence of stressors, including light pollution, chemical pollution, climate change, and habitat loss. Insects are an essential keystone to life on this planet, and as we lose them, the species domino effect becomes clearer. For example, if honeybees native to the US die out, all the species of plants they pollinate could follow, with no other intervention - that's 80% of flowering plants. The US Department of Agriculture estimates those plants account for 25% of the food Americans eat today.

"Around 200 million years ago, flowering plants and insects started to co-evolve with each other. If you start to alter either the behaviour of the insect or the behavioural physiology of the plant, you're going to affect both of them," says Seymoure. "[With light pollution] you have this new weird situation that's going to have consequences for everything on this planet because pretty much everything depends on insects and flowering plants - 80% of our crop species are pollinated by insects."

By artificially extending the length of the day, light pollution can cause changes in a a plant's flowering pattern (Credit: Frank-Bienewald / Getty Images)

Plants and pollinators rely on temperature and light changes to know how, and when, to carry out their life processes. As the planet warms and light pollution grows, these processes will be thrown more and more off-balance, and it's unclear if the affected species will adapt fast enough to survive.

"Light pollution and climate change are making these cues [light and temperature] less reliable and causing some ecological chaos," says Alaasam.

Despite all of this, there are pollinators that aren't as negatively affected by light pollution. In fact, some have evolved to use it to their advantage. One study that looked at "city moths" from 10 different populations found that they'd adapted not to fly to artificial light at night. "Moths that had been exposed to artificial light over the last 20 to 50 years no longer had the genes that allowed them to fly to the light," says Seymoure.

Pollinating bats also seem to have found a positive loophole. Not only do artificial lights illuminate the bugs they like to eat, but a 2022 study found they also increased pollination due to more fruit and seeds on the artificially illuminated trees (a potential result of excessive blooming). That may only be a temporary boon, however. As Seymoure fears, too much artificial light exposure could be overtaxing trees, weakening them over time.

It might seem like these small changes won't have sweeping effects, but all these changes can also save money through lower energy costs too. This might help convince your office manager, landlord or city council to cut back on light pollution, says Alaasam.

These changes are starting to happen more and more in small, eco-conscious pockets of the world. The more communities start reaping the benefits, then perhaps others will follow suit, drawn like, forgive the expression, a moth to a flame.

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How light pollution disrupts plants' senses

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Dazzling lights are causing ecological chaos, disrupting plants' seasonal rhythms and their fragile relationship with pollinators.

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Some other information sources to consider

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Some other information sources to consider

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THE IMPORTANCE OF POLLINATORS

The vast majority of plant species-- almost 90%, in fact-- rely on pollinators to reproduce. Pollination is the process by which pollinators help plants to produce fruit (technically anything with seeds on the inside, so that includes things we normally think of as vegetables, like cucumbers, green beans and tomatoes) by transporting pollen from one flower to another. There are approximately 200,000 different species of animals around the world that act as pollinators. Of these, about 1,000 are vertebrates, such as birds, bats, and small mammals, and the rest are invertebrates, including flies, beetles, butterflies, moths, and bees. Pollinators provide pollination services to over 180,000 different plant species.

Pollinators help plants survive, and plants:

Produce ⅓ of our food supply by giving us countless fruits, vegetables, and nuts

Provide ½ of the world's oils, fibers (such as the cotton used to make clothes), and other raw materials

Are used to create many medicines

Provide food and cover for wildlife

Keep waterways clean

Prevent soil erosion

Produce the oxygen we breathe

Absorb CO2, counteracting global climate change

Globally, pollinators are responsible for pollinating more than 1,200 crops. 87 of the leading 115 food crops, or about 75%, depend on pollinators. Every year, pollinators contribute more than $217 billion to the global economy, and $24 billion to the US economy. If we consider the indirect products of plants, such as milk and beef from cows fed on alfalfa, the value of pollinator services in the US would increase to an incredible $40 billion.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HONEY BEES

Honey bees are among the most numerous and efficient pollinator species in the world. Considering that the average honey bee can visit more than 2,000 flowers in one day, these bees greatly increase the chances of a plant producing a fruit or vegetable.

Honey bees are the species most commonly used as commercial pollinators in the US. They are managed and used to pollinate over 100 crops grown in North America, and contribute $15 billion to the US economy every year. Many crops, such as almonds, which contribute $4.8 billion to the US industry each year, rely on honey bees for more than 90% of their pollination.

But honey bees don't only pollinate crops-- they also pollinate wild and native plants, thus contributing to all the environmental and societal benefits attributed to pollinators in general above.

HONEY BEE DECLINE

Honey bees are clearly vital parts of our ecosystem, acting as highly efficient pollinators of our food crops as well as for wild flora. We need bees to keep our crops and earth healthy, but in recent years their numbers have been decreasing by the billions. This decline has been linked to several factors, including parasites such as varroa mites, which bite bees and infect them with fatal viruses (read more about varroa mites here!), the use of pesticides which poison bees, and monoculture farming, which prevents them from having a varied diet.

Last year, in 2016, 44% of managed beehives in the US died. The number of managed honey bee colonies in the United States has declined steadily over the past 60 years, from 6 million colonies (beehives) in 1947 to 4 million in 1970, 3 million in 1990, and just 2.5 million today. Overwintering loss rates have increased from the historical rate of 10-15% to approximately 30%, and beekeepers have collectively lost approximately 10 million beehives.

THE ROLE OF NATIVE BEES

Did you know that there are 4,000 different bee species native to North America? These bees vary widely, from cuckoo bees to bumble bees. Some are smaller than an eighth of an inch, while others are more than an inch long. They range in color from metallic green or blue to dark brown or black to striped red or orange.

Native bees are often overlooked because they aren't domesticated, or because some of them don't look like "traditional" bees (fuzzy, black and yellow). But these bees are the original residents of North America, who quietly and industriously pollinate our crops side by side with the honey bee.

Native bees might not spend much time in the spotlight, but they make a huge contribution to our environment and our economy. In 2009, the crop benefits from native insect pollination in the United States were valued at more than $9 billion dollars.

Sadly, native bees are struggling just as much as honey bees. Many species are endangered (read more about their endangerment here), and a few have already gone extinct. The factors that harm managed honey bees also harm wild bees, such as parasites, pathogens, and poor nutrition due to monoculture farms. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences last year found that wild bees may be disappearing in California's Central Valley, the Midwest's corn belt, the Mississippi River Valley and other key farm regions. Between 2008 and 2013, modeled bee abundance declined across 23% of US land area.

Now more than ever we must find new and innovative ways to protect these national treasures and preserve the balance of our ecosystem.

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Bees and other pollinators are responsible for a third of our food and contribute over $217 billion to the global economy each year. They also pollinate almost 90% of the world's plants, keeping our environment healthy and providing habitats for countless other species. Let's show the bees some love

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How to attract bees into the garden-By getting high pollinated flowers throughout the year. 

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How to attract bees into the garden-By getting high pollinated flowers throughout the year. 

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How people can use their gardens to help reduce pollution-More plants and trees always help as this purifies the air, plants take in carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen which is then returned into the atmosphere.

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How people can use their gardens to help reduce pollution-More plants and trees always help as this purifies the air, plants take in carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen which is then returned into the atmosphere.

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How bees are affected by pollution-Pollution makes it difficult for bees to remember where they're floral resources are located.

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How bees are affected by pollution-Pollution makes it difficult for bees to remember where they're floral resources are located.

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Why we need bees-Bees pollinate our wild trees and flowers, which then support other insects and mammals that go up in the food chain.

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Why we need bees-Bees pollinate our wild trees and flowers, which then support other insects and mammals that go up in the food chain.