App aims to find homes for bees, other pollinators
A new app called Lawn to Wildflowers from the University of Central Florida’s College of Sciences offers a guide on how to transform a yard into a home for bees, butterflies and other pollinators.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says bees, some birds, bats and other insects are responsible for pollinating about 75 percent of the world’s flowering plants.
Without them, other wildlife would have fewer nutritious berries and seeds, and people would have significantly fewer fruits, vegetables and nuts, said Lisa Roberts, executive director of the Florida Wildflowers Foundation.
“Wildflowers are key to making the world go round,” Roberts said. “They provide food, nectar, pollen and shelter for the little things, and those little things are insects. … Eighty-five percent of our crops depend on pollination.”
The app doesn’t focus on honeybees. Rather, it considers most of the other 5,200 species of bees that are in a state of crisis due to habitat loss.
Honeybees are “economically important, but they’re not at all the focus of our conservation efforts,” said Nash Turley, cofounder of the app and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Central Florida. “Honeybees are not good for the environment, really, in any way.”
Turley said that’s because honeybees are not a native species to North America and instead are considered to be a semidomesticated species, so they have a similar status to cattle and chickens.
“Pollinators have
evolved
to have their whole livelihood be based on flowers, but it’s also the critical relationship for the flowers themselves. The purpose of