Family Fun Activity: Build a Pollinator Hotel
It's National Public Gardens Week! Let's Celebrate Bees and Other Pollinators
To celebrate National Public Gardens Week, we’d like to give some love to one of the most important group of organisms that are essential to our gardens: Pollinators!
This group includes birds, bats, bees, and other insects such as beetles, butterflies, wasps, and dragonflies. These incredible creatures contribute to the survival of about 80% of all flowering plants and 35% of all food crops around the world. In turn, the plants produced through pollination take on even bigger ecosystem services such as biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and transpiration.
The Amazing Bee
Of those pollinators mentioned above, the Bee is the most productive due to their fuzzy bodies and their ability to buzz and shake pollen free from flowers. Maryland is home to over 400 different species of Bees alone! Most of Maryland’s bee species are not the honey bee or bumble bee we’ve come to know so well but are solitary bees. Solitary bees don’t build large, communal hives, but rather, a female solitary bee will build individual nests to lay their pupae.
Make a Pollinator Hotel
However, our native populations are decreasing due to climate change, over-use of pesticides, and decreased diversification of plants.
You can help! There are several ways to help pollinators such as:
build a pollinator hotel out of materials you might already have at home