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Agriculture is often suggested as one of the main drivers of pollinator loss by causing damages to their habitats and resources. But we can’t stop our food production and for this production we need pollinators. Both have to continue side by side. A good management of farming area can resolve this issue, providing both good agricultural outputs and good habitat for pollinators.

The limestone paving is one of the key habitats in the Burren region. Image credit: Marie Carco.

The Burren region is situated on the seaboard in the west of Ireland, and is a successful example economically viable agriculture for farmers while also having benefits for biodiversity. This limestone landscape has a really rich flora (more than 600 of Ireland’s 900 native plant species are found in the Burren) and as a result it is also an important place for the pollinator diversity, especially bumblebees.

You can find several different bumblebee species including one in decline in Europe, the Shrill carder bee (Bombus sylvarum)which has its main Irish stronghold in the Burren. Some observations also notify the rarest Great yellow bumblebee’s presence (Bombus distinguendus). Both are late emerging species and endangered in Ireland.

Burren biodiversity is intimately linked to a traditional farming called « winterage », where livestock graze upland limestone grassland during the winter and move to lowland more fertile (but less diverse) grassland during the summer. This allows late summer wild flowers to grow up during summer and set seed, which also creates an incredibly diverse pantry for pollinators.

During the 1970’s, changes in agricultural management appeared in the Burren and elsewhere in Ireland supported by national and European schemes. The switch of traditional practices to conventional farming led to an increase in the earlier mowing of silage, grazing of limestone grassland during summer, or housing of livestock during winter. The diversity of late summer wildflowers specific to limestone grassland were reduced by grazing, or sometimes with scrub encroachement. As the result nesting habitats and forage resource for pollinators were also damaged, especially for the late emerging species.

In 2005 the BurrenLIFE project was established to develop local practical solutions to the agricultural issues that threatened the priority habitats in the Burren. Mostly funded by the EU LIFE-Nature Programme, it was a partnership between the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Teagasc (the Agriculture and Food Development Authority) and the Burren Irish Farmers Association. The BurrenLIFE project was a result based agri-environment scheme, where farmers received payment for the ecological integrity of their land, among other factors, leading to environmental health turning into incomes per hectare for the farmer. Land with high health scores permitted to the farmer receive a high payment, whereas nothing was received if fields had a low (under 5) scores. Farmer also received payments for the improvement of water access and paths to grassland for the livestock to develop winter grazing. The project finished in 2010 with a great success (the project jointly won the EU “Best Nature” Green Award this year).

Currently the next phase of the project, Burren Programme (2016-2022), covers about 300 farmers across the Burren. The programme promotes floral diversity, and most likely by consequence safe habitats for pollinators. The ecosystem services for farmers improved also.

Traditional grazing methods increase wildflowers, and so improves the quality of habitats for pollinators. In turn wild pollinators enhance the quality of grassland, as they permit a better diversity and quantityof grazing for cattle food production and so enhance the quality of production. Burren Life Programme has been successful in maintening and promoting floral plant diversity characteristics to the Burren (You can read “Farming and the Burren” from Brendan Dunford for more information). Research is currently being carried out by Michelle Larkin (NUI Galway) to investigate whether this good management of farmland could have a positive effect on pollinator’s populations also.

Marie Carco is working with Trinity graduate and PhD holder Dr Dara Stanley (Lecturer in Plant Ecology at NUI Galway, @DaraStanley). Marie is in the first year of her Master’s in Biology, Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bordeaux.

If you’re a bee you are 100% focussed on collecting pollen to feed to your young. This makes bees our most important pollinators, but not our only ones. Lots of other insects also visit flowers to feed on nectar. In doing so, these insects accidentally move some pollen around – just not so much or so deliberately. To help our non-bee pollinators we need to be more insect friendly. The more insects of all types, the more pollination!

Hoverflies come second in the pollinating awards – this is mainly because some of them mimic bees, and being hairy like bees, pollen is more likely to stick to their bodies as they move from flower to flower. We have 180 hoverfly species in Ireland. Their larval stage varies greatly from species to species. Some live in the nests of other insects like bumblebees or wasps, some live in water, some in dung and some in plant stems.

Given the complexity of different lifecycles in our non-bee pollinators, it’s much harder to identify specific actions that will have a big impact. However, if you allow your garden, school, campus or local area to be a place that is insect friendly you can’t go wrong. Unlike us, they’re not so keen on order and neatness. Avoid spraying chemicals. Don’t cut the grass so often so that they have more wildflowers to feed on. Have wild areas with nettles where butterfly and moth caterpillars can live. Have log piles where ladybirds and beetles can shelter. Ponds, however tiny, can provide excellent habitat. We find it easy to see beauty in individual bits of nature. If we could better see the beauty in the whole complex, fascinating and untidy mess we’d all be better off!

Dr Úna FitzPatrick did both her undergraduate degree and PhD at Trinity. She is the Project co-ordinator for the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan at the National Biodiversity Data Centre.

When most people think of bees, they think primarily of the European honeybee (Apis mellifera). Ironically, the honeybee couldn’t be a worse representative of bees in general. There are thought to be between 20,000-25,000 species of bees globally…this means there are likely more species of bees than fish or birds.

While the honeybee is a eusocial, cavity-nesting, and honey-storing (to borrow a botanical term, perennial) insect, the vast majority of unmanaged and wild bees are solitary, ground-nesting, and annual. They range in size from 2 mm (Perdita minima, the smallest bee in the world) to over 6.4 cm (Megachile pluto, the largest bee in the world) and come in a variety of shapes and colours, with some fascinating life histories. Did you know that some bees scavenge dead animals (the exception to bee veganism), some make their own cellophane, or cut leaves and petals to make nests with? Some bees collect oils and some collect scents from orchids. Bees are interesting, beautiful, diverse…and essential to human health.

You may think the most important thing bees provide is honey, but the honeybee pollination industry is worth approximately 15 billion dollars a year in the US alone, while the honey industry is only worth 150 million/year in the US. (Honey is only worth 1% of the pollination industry in the US!)

Though honeybees have a long association (4,000 + years) with humans because of their honey, the majority of pollination services on Earth are provided by wild bees. This is true for more “natural” and unmanaged ecosystems, but it is also true even where honeybee hives are regularly rented for their pollination services. In the apple orchards of New York, for example, wild bees have been shown to provide more than twice as many pollination services on average, even though the vast majority of orchard managers spend a significant amount of money each year renting honeybee hives.

If you’re worried about stinging, you’ll also be happy to learn that the barbed stinger is unique to the honeybee, designed to be painful to honey thieves. Because male bees are incapable of stinging (the stinger is a modified ovipositor), and the majority of solitary bees have a male-biased population ratio (1.5 male:female), most bees can’t sting. Add to that the fact that many groups of wild bees don’t have stingers that can penetrate human skin (e.g. mining bees, nicknamed “tickle bees” by some), and there are whole groups of social stingless bees, you can rest assured that the vast majority of the bee world won’t or can’t sting you.

You may be excited to learn about some of the fascinating bees in your own backyard. For example, the British Isles and Ireland are home to a snail shell-nesting bee. If you want to learn more about these charismatic animals, there are a variety of ways to get involved, including citizen science projects like Ireland’s bumblebee monitoring scheme, solitary bee monitoring scheme, and rare species watch.

Or you can just watch and enjoy the pollinators in your own backyard as they work to keep Earth’s ecosystems functioning smoothly, pollinating the crops we rely on, and the flowers we enjoy.

Dr Laura Russo is a postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity funded by a Marie Curie Sklodowska Fellowship. She is studying the impact of agricultural runoff, both fertilizer and herbicide, on communities of plants and their insect pollinators (https://www.tcd.ie/Botany/staff/stout/project-effects-of-fertilisation.php).

Pollination is a vital service provided by a plethora of animals, including honeybees, bumble bees, and other insects, as well as some birds and mammals. Many of our food crops rely on animal pollinators to produce large yields. Therefore, the loss of pollinators such as bees will have profound implications for the global agri-food sector, with consumer nations such as Ireland particularly vulnerable.

The agri-food and drink sector in Ireland accounts for 7.2% of the goods and services produced by Ireland’s economy and 12.3% of Ireland’s exports (source: DAFM). The horticultural industry alone produces >€380 million worth of fruit and vegetables annually, including many common insect-pollinated crops such as apples, strawberries and raspberries. However, this only represents a small proportion of total demand and as a result we import >€1 billion worth of fruit and vegetables each year (source: CSO). Many of these are pollinator-dependent crops (e.g. oranges, peaches, pears etc.) and therefore the global loss of insect pollinators is predicted to have a profound impact on our local economy.

In addition to the market values of pollinators, we also appreciate them for their intrinsic value and for the ecosystem services they provide. They play a vital role in maintaining plant community structure and for the propagation of wild species, thus maintaining healthy biodiversity in our landscapes. For example, the celebrated landscapes of the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, which attract visitors from all over the world for their beauty, depend on pollinators to support a rich variety of wild flowers.

This globalised, interconnected world in which we live means that a holistic approach must be taken in order to protect vulnerable pollinator species. By understanding how interconnected and dependent we are on pollinators, not just in an ecological sense but also from a global, economic perspective, we can better understand the impacts of pollinator losses and enact integrated policies to halt their decline. In this way, we will be able to continue to enjoy the fruits of their labours for generations to come!

Dr. James Murphy (@jmurphyscience) is working on a 2 year EPA-funded research project POLLIVAL (@pollivaltcd) with Prof Jane Stout in Trinity College Dublin. The aim of the project is to assess the market and non-market values of insect pollinators and to estimate the costs to the Irish economy of continuing pollinator declines.