Editorial: Bee open-minded about pollinator assumptions

Sometimes it’s good to check your assumptions at the door, but that seems to be a tougher action for people, especially with access to so much information that can reinforce your thoughts.

Journalists are trained to do this early in their career and you get far more interesting and better stories when you arrive with assumptions you’re willing to have challenged.

All this is to say I’ve recently had some of my assumptions challenged related to agricultural practices.

I’ve defended agriculture and monoculture crops related to bee survival. However, a recent study said that urban areas, with all of their concrete and blacktop, are more productive for bees than farms — with large swaths of single types of crops.

At first, I scoffed. I have assumed that with that vast amount of plants in rural areas, including crops, there would be at least as much pollen to harvest as in the concrete jungle.

But researchers showed that bees had to fly further in farming areas to retrieve the same amount of pollen. It makes sense when you think about it.

Pollen retrieval is all about the density of blooms. Even though urban areas are paved over and built upon, most properties, especially urban properties have some sort of decorative blooming plants around. On a 50-foot by 150-foot lot that means a lot of permanent ground covered by asphalt, concrete and grass, but in most of those lots there are also pollinator-friendly plants.

An acre is 43,560 square feet and a 50-foot by 150-foot lot covers 7,500 square feet, so you can get about six lots in an acre. Minus about 20 per cent for roads and services, you have about five lots.

In a 50-acre field of corn, that’s 250 lots for houses. Most of those houses will have pollinating plants good for bees to forage. Those plants will also be quite diverse and if the gardener is doing his or her job, then the blooms will show up throughout the growing season.

Row crops that cover millions of acres like corn, soybeans and wheat don’t flower for long and only flower once in the growing process, unlike other plants that happily flower for much longer periods.

A 50-acre field of corn can then be like a desert for a bee, a place with little sustenance and habitat.

I’m not absolving urban people for having a few ornamental plants. Creating vast swaths of grass in cities makes little sense other than where needed for recreation and there could be much better pollinator habitat created. But there’s work to do in rural areas as well.

The practicalities of farming require us to limit flowering in many areas of agriculture.

Growing up on a dairy farm, the cutting of alfalfa was targeted just before flowering. If the hay field started turning purplish from alfalfa flowers, you knew that quality was heading downhill.

Even among some cover crops, like annual ryegrass, the goal is to avoid allowing it to flower and then set seed, which will result in years of ryegrass management challenges.

There’s little appetite among farmers to reduce sizes of fields, driven by economics and larger equipment. However, every field has an edge and it’s in those field edges where there’s potential for providing pollination options for bees.

In a recent Glacier FarmMedia Between the Rows podcast that looks at various issues related to bees and pollinators, Farmtario contributor Matt McIntosh talked to Jennifer Doelman, a Renfrew County agronomist and farmer, about the pollinator strips she creates and how she strategically decides that land isn’t profitable to farm and would be more valuable in something like a pollinator strip.

I know from experience that pollinator plantings can be expensive and difficult to establish.

I think there are lessons we can learn from the increasing amount of cover crop adoption. There are many options for cover crops and we now know how they fit within certain herbicide and crop rotation programs.

Coming up with a pollinator plant program that works around the edges of corn, soybean and wheat rotations, yet still provides blooms throughout the year is one route ahead and maybe it needs the long-term push that’s resulted in growing acres of cover crops.