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Article about the importance of pollinators

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Green invaders are taking over America. Nope, not invaders from space. Plants. You might not think of plants as dangerous, but in this case they are threatening nature's delicate food web.

The invaders are plants from other countries brought here to make gardens and yards look pretty. Ever since people started to arrive on America's shores, they've carried along trees, flowers, and vegetables from other places.

Now there are so many of those plants, they are crowding out the native plants that have lived here since before human settlers arrived.

And that's a problem, says Dr. Doug Tallamy. He's an entomologist (an insect expert) at the University of Delaware. He explains that almost all the plant-eating insects in the United States-90% of them-are specialized. That means they eat only certain plants.

Monarch butterfly caterpillars, for example, dine on milkweed. If people cut down milkweed and replace it with another plant, the butterflies will not have the food source that they need to survive.

But the trouble doesn't stop there, it goes right across the food web. When insects can't get the right plants to eat and they die off, then the birds don't have enough bugs for their meals. Tallamy points out that almost all migrating birds depend on insects to feed their young.

"We cannot let the plants and animals around us disappear," says Tallamy. "The way to preserve them is to give them food to eat. But when we plant non-native plants, we are clobbering the food web, because then we don't have the insects the birds need to live."

Fewer of the right plants mean fewer bugs, and fewer bugs mean fewer birds. And that's bad for the Earth, because we need a variety of living things to keep the planet healthy and beautiful.

The good news is, gardeners everywhere are working hard to protect native plants and get rid of the invaders. Many local garden centers sell native plants. "Just research 'native plants' and your location, and you can find out which plants really belong where you live," says Tallamy.

Planting the right things makes a real difference, and fast. He describes planting milkweed in a tiny city courtyard about the size of a living room one spring. By summertime, that milkweed patch had produced 50 new monarch butterflies!

Tallamy encourages kids to go out and plant native plants. "Adopt a bird species in trouble and see if you can't plant some things that will attract the insects they need," he suggests. "It will happen-insects move around a lot, and they will find the plants you put out there for them!"

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Green invaders are taking over America. Nope, not invaders from space. Plants. You might not think of plants as dangerous, but in this case they are threatening nature's delicate food web. The invaders are plants from other countries brought here to make gardens and yards look pretty.

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Module 3 Unit 2 Lesson 1 PowerPoint
What is Pollination?

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BrainPop video about pollination

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Video

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Tube-Lipped Nectar Bat | Untamed Americas

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Video about Pollinators

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The hidden beauty of pollination | Louie Schwartzberg

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This article gives key information about bees and their important job as a pollinator.

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Honeybees live in colonies with one queen running the whole hive. Worker honeybees are all females and are the only bees most people ever see flying around outside of the hive. They forage for food, build the honeycombs, and protect the hive. Many species still occur in the wild, but honeybees are disappearing from hives due to colony collapse disorder. Scientists are not sure what is causing this collapse. Honeybees are important pollinators for flowers, fruits, and vegetables. They live on stored honey and pollen all winter and cluster into a ball to conserve warmth. All honeybees are social and cooperative insects. Members of the hive are divided into three types. Workers forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean, and circulate air by beating their wings. The queen’s job is simple—she lays the eggs that will spawn the hive’s next generation of bees. There is usually only a single queen in a hive. If the queen dies, workers will create a new queen by feeding one of the worker females a special food called “royal jelly.” This elixir enables the worker to develop into a fertile queen. Queens regulate the hive’s activities by producing chemicals that guide the behavior of the other bees. Male bees are called drones—the third class of honeybee. Several hundred drones live in each hive during the spring and summer, but they are expelled for the winter months when the hive goes into a lean survival mode.