The Buzz on Native Pollinators

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The Buzz on Native Pollinators
By Laura Tangley
National Wildlife Organization

As European honeybees decline, indigenous bees and other pollinating animals can provide a backup—with a little help from their human friends

WHEN ECOLOGIST Rachel Winfree set out to survey native bees in the Delaware Valley of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, she was not optimistic about her results. Not only is the region far from any known hot spots of bee diversity, such as the U.S. Southwest, “New Jersey is also the most densely populated state in the country,” says Winfree, an assistant professor in the Department of Entomology at Rutgers University. "I was worried that after getting funding and hiring a staff, the project would turn out to be a waste of time."

Her fears were unfounded. "We found bees everywhere," says Winfree—thousands of individuals of 46 different species. More surprising, she and her colleagues discovered that the number of flower visits by these natives was sufficient to fully pollinate the watermelon crop on 21 of 23 farms in her study region.

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