Connecting Habitat

Imagine you are a tiny pollinator, buzzing around the Greenway. You are a lucky bee, for there are plenty of flowers that bloom there throughout the season, and plenty of other pollinators to meet.

What if your patch were not so big? You would have to buzz off to find other flowers and other bees. You have to cross streets and avoid windshields, and travel over long swaths of green lawn, devoid of any nutritious flowers and perhaps even poisoned regularly to prevent any useful flowers from growing.

But what if instead every block had a yard with a kind owner, who grew a small plot of native prairie plants--perhaps not enough to sustain you for an entire season, but enough for you to stop and refresh yourself before moving on to the next patch?

Instead of having to navigate, say, all the way from the north end of the Greenway to the Terry Trueblood Recreation Area in one long go (impossible for many of our small native bees), you could spend a leisurely few days yard-hopping from one friendly garden to the next.

When you plan your garden for next spring, why not dedicate a part of it to helping the pollinators in return for everything they do for us? Although the ideal would be a completely connected, unbroken corridor between larger habitat areas, imagine if every house in your neighborhood dedicated a small strip of their land to pollinators. Wouldn't that be more attractive, and more interesting, than turf?

Sources/Resources:

• Pollinator Pathways
• Good Neighbor Iowa
• Plant. Grow. Fly. (Blank Park Zoo)
• Pollinator Gardening (Reiman Gardens)