Creative Pollinator Projects Aim to Aid Bees, Butterflies and More

Humans have been distancing ourselves from nature for centuries, with a rapid acceleration since the Industrial Age. Today, as habitat loss, climate change and pesticide use drive a drastic decline in pollinators, which are responsible for at least a third of the food we eat worldwide, many of us are realizing it’s time to invite nature back in.

People have never been more aware of the need to boost the populations of birds and bats, bees, butterflies and other invaluable insects. Our cities may be the strongest lever we have to reverse their downward trend. 

While about 41 percent of land in the United States is agricultural, 54 percent is covered by cities and suburbs plus airports and other infrastructure. And the city portion is growing fast, adding one million urban acres every year, according to a 2018 report.

In Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard, Douglas Tallamy flags built and urban spaces as the next frontier for ecological transformation. 
He writes:

“Restoring viable habitat within the human-dominated landscapes that separate habitat fragments—with as much of this land as possible—is the single most effective thing we can do to stop the steady drain of species from our local ecosystems.”

Cities across the nation are finding creative and inspiring ways to encourage pollinators by “rewilding” their patches of green and finding win-win solutions that enrich and build communities. I only had to look within my own city, Seattle, to find excellent examples:

Pollinator Pathways 

In 2007, artist Sarah Bergmann won awards from the Seattle Art Museum and others after teaming with city agencies and designers to transform homeowners’ sidewalk plantings into a one-mile pollinator-friendly corridor sandwiched by public green spaces. To launch the Pollinator Pathway, Bergmann went door-to-door to homeowners, offering to design and help maintain the parking strips with volunteers. She provides a free online guide to creating Pollinator Pathways in any community. 

Elsewhere in Seattle there’s the Green Line, a 14-mile stretch that runs beneath high-voltage power lines. Several community groups, including The Common Acre, came together to restore native plants to this previously weedy corridor and steward the space. The Common Acre also designed a program called Flight Path, which maintains beehives and supportive native plantings at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, making use of adjacent land that was once a golf course. Tracking the bee population over the project’s first 5 years, they found it increased by 70 percent.

Urban Food Forests

Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest is a public urban food garden that covers three acres. Built in layers, the food forest produces everything from root vegetables and salad greens to tree fruit like peaches, apples, medlar and madrone. Most of the Beacon Food Forest, which sits on land owned by Seattle’s Department of Public Utilities, is “open harvest”—that is, anyone can come in and pick as much as they need from designated spaces (some areas are reserved for food-bank donations and community-garden plots). And the project delights species of all kinds, thanks to its permaculture management centered around cooperative guilds of plants. 

“The BFF is not a pollinator garden by design—it already is a pollinator paradise,” notes volunteer Tony Dickey. He explains: “It’s an uninterrupted landscape, and in our 10 years we’ve never used any pesticides.”

Native lupine is one of Tony’s favorite plants, one that demonstrates multiple functions. A groundcover, it protects the soil; it also fixes nitrogen, making it available to other plants; and it serves pollinators. 

The food forest draws so many beneficial insects that volunteers have begun cataloging them, using the iNaturalist app. 

“It’s a great opportunity to teach the public about native bees,” says Dickey. 

Low-Mow Parks

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked an idea for Todd Burley, Sustainability Strategic Advisor for Seattle Parks and Recreation. He saw a chance to support pollinators simply by not mowing sections of the city’s 1,100 acres of lawn, in addition to several existing meadows.  

“There are opportunities to get more out of the landscape,” says Burley. “To not just think of it as ornamental, but a place for healing, nutritious habitat, biodiversity—it’s more than just something to look at.” 

Maintaining these sections as meadows means mowing perhaps every one to three years to control invasives like Himalayan blackberry or Scotch broom. 

“There’s a significant savings of time, labor, fuel consumption, while at the same time providing floral resources that help pollinators survive,” he says. “That’s the vision.”

Looking ahead, Todd notes that his department plans to link several parks and a corporate campus with a Pollinator Corridor. A part of Seattle’s waterfront renovation, it is hoped to be the first of several such plantings.

Nationwide Efforts

Bee City USA and Bee Campus USA, now run by the Xerces Society, began in 2012 as a project of North Carolina gardener and beekeeper Phyllis Stiles. Today there are 157 Bee Cities and 140 Bee Campuses in 45 states. Stiles says the momentum of the project still amazes her.

“Once someone knows what’s at stake and how they can help, they do!” she told me in an e-mail. “Thousands of people are changing America’s landscaping paradigms away from insect-free lawns, exotic plants and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to biologically diverse habitats that welcome the insects, birds and other animals with whom we share this rich planet.” 

To become a Bee City, the local government adopts an initiative committing to measures that conserve and promote pollinators and their habitats, such as expanding or enhancing habitat annually, reducing pesticide use, incorporating pollinator-conscious pest-management policies and promoting awareness through events and online media. 

Xerces Society’s Laura Rost says the goal is to let each affiliate adapt the program to its needs and strengths. She points out that a major goal is to increase awareness of pollinators, and that it’s working.

“The knowledge and interest people have in native bees has increased exponentially. We’ve had major issues around climate change and seeing species die off, and the alarm bells are being sounded,” she says. “Quite a few cities have done some really remarkable work.” 

She points to Asheville, N.C., which has created a garden certification program; Maryland’s Howard County, which designed six pollinator garden templates to share with residents; Decatur, Ga.—also known as Beecatur—which created a campaign to stamp out mosquito spraying, a significant local issue; and Ashland, Ore., which hosts an annual fundraising tour of certified pollinator-friendly gardens. (The Ashland Conservation District also doles out a $3,000 rebate for homeowners who swap their lawn for a low-water landscape, which can also serve as a pollinator garden.)

Another national program is Pollinator Partnership, which guides the support of pollinators on farms, highways, utility corridors, in managed timberland and habitat restoration of rare native plants. 

“We are agnostic when it comes to our pollinators we are trying to preserve,” says Miles Dakin, the organization’s Bee Friendly Farming Coordinator. “What’s good for honeybees is generally good for all others. We are trying to bring awareness to other pollinators, like flies and beetles and beneficial insects.”

In Healdsburg, Calif., Jordan Winery—a certified Bee-Friendly Farm on the monarch migration route—recently began converting 10 acres of grassland into preserved pollinator habitat supporting monarchs as well as native bees, hummingbirds and others. The first plantings covered 8 acres and included 2,400 plants, 600 of which are milkweed (Asclepias), a key host plant for monarchs.

Pollinator Partnership also leads Wingspan programs across several states to protect and support monarch butterflies, which have declined by over 90 percent in the last 20 years. For instance, Project Wingspan Chicago focuses on the challenge of sourcing and supplying local genotype native-plant seed, which can be challenging to find as habitat shrinks. It’s hard to plant native plants to feed local pollinators if you can’t find them! To combat this problem, trained volunteers collect seed and partner nurseries grow it on and sell or give away the plants.