Understanding Pollinator Decline and Its Causes
Launch library · evergreen read
Pollinators, including bees, butterflies and various other insects, face pressure from several directions at once: habitat loss that removes the flowering plants they depend on, pesticide exposure that can harm them directly or indirectly, and the spread of disease and parasites that move more easily between stressed, fragmented populations.
Because many pollinators rely on a sequence of flowering plants across the seasons to have food available continuously, landscapes that have lost their diversity of native flowering species, replaced instead by large areas of a single crop or a uniformly mown lawn, can leave pollinators with genuine gaps in available food.
Supporting pollinators in gardens and public spaces generally means planting a diverse mix of flowering species that bloom at different times of year, avoiding unnecessary pesticide use wherever practical, and leaving some undisturbed ground or dead wood available, since many native pollinator species nest in soil or hollow plant stems rather than a hive.