Bee the Change

Having a perfectly manicured lawn in your front yard is often a goal for many homeowners. But all that freshly mowed grass doesn't make a great habitat for Minnesota’s pollinators. Dan Shaw and Erin Loeffler join us from the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources to discuss pollinators and the Lawns to Legumes program. This program is helping the public rebuild pollinator habitats in Minnesota. Listen in to find out how you can Bee the Change.

Smarty Plants is a podcast of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Visit www.mda.state.mn.us/plants-insects/smarty-plants for more episodes. Look for a new episode of Smarty Plants every month.

Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hello everyone, I am Jennifer Burington, and welcome to Smarty Plants, a Minnesota Department of Agriculture podcast informing the public about invasive species that affect our environment and agricultural resources. Minnesota's pollinators, including native bees, are facing rapid declines due to habitat loss and other pressures. In response, the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources, also known as BWSR, launched the Lawns to Legumes program in 2019. This collaborative effort brings together legislators, conservation organizations, and the public to help rebuild pollinator habitats across the state. In today's episode, we're talking with Dan Shaw and Erin Loeffler from BWSR about why pollinator declines matter, how programs like Lawns to Legumes are making a difference, and what you can do to help support pollinators. Dan Shaw is a senior ecologist and vegetation specialist with BOWSER. His work focuses on conservation partnerships, plant community restoration, climate mitigation and adaptation, pollinator habitat, and invasive species control. He has also taught design and restoration classes at the University of Minnesota for the past 25 years and authored or co-authored several publications, including Plants for Stormwater Design, Planting for Pollinators, and The Blue Thumb Guide to Rain Gardens. Erin Loeffler is an ecological conservationist with BOWSER and has worked in the conservation field more than 20 years. She co-leads BOWSER's Living Landscapes Initiative, a statewide effort to strengthen the resiliency of Minnesota's natural and working lands. Through collaboration with partners and communities, Erin focuses on supporting at-risk wildlife species, restoring habitat corridors, and engaging Minnesotans in conservation practices that enhance soil health, water quality, and biodiversity. Welcome, Dan and Erin. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. It's great to be here. Great to be here. So to start us off, Dan, can you give our listeners a quick overview of what the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources does and its role in conservation across the state? Sure. Well, the mission of the organization is to work in partnerships to improve Minnesota's water and soil resources. We're very focused on supporting the ecological and economic health of the state, and we work through grants and technical resources and trainings for local organizations. And our work is really focused on working on private lands, which make up around 75 percent of the land area of Minnesota. Yeah, the Board of Water and Soil Resources is kind of a unique state agency. We're fairly small. We have, I think, just over 140 people that work for our agency, and we operate under a board of 20 different members. So those are citizen members, those are city, county representation on there. So it's kind of a unique state agency, and we're really proud to be a part of it, and it's a really efficient way to get good things on the ground. So Bowser works towards big statewide goals like clean water, healthy wildlife habitat, and wetland protection. How do you take those big picture goals and turn them into practical solutions that work for local communities? Well, I think it's important to note that successful conservation really results from strong partnerships. So we work with a lot of different organizations and work with the public. So we're really prioritizing collaboration with the work that we're doing. Most of the funding that goes out through the agency is going to local organizations to work with communities, and it's that strong leadership that they're providing that is really leading to good on-the-ground projects. We're really fortunate in Minnesota to have a lot of motivated partners and a lot of motivated members of the public, and that's what's leading to success with our conservation projects. So you're talking about all these partnerships and working with local landowners. So Bowser has done a lot of work with pollinator conservation. Can you kind of give our audience an idea of what pollinators are, because there are a lot of different types of pollinators, and then what they do? Yeah, that's a good question. We do have a lot of different types of pollinators in Minnesota. Bees are the ones that people think of first usually, but wasps are included, hover flies, so we have a lot of native flies in the state, butterflies as well, moths and beetles and hummingbirds. They're all different kinds of pollinators that are essentially moving pollen and fertilizing plants and allowing for the production of seed and fruit. Perfect. Yeah, I've always seen a lot of bumblebees on all the flowers and native plantings and gardens and it's nice to see those butterflies, and sometimes you get that random hummingbird that is able to come in and stuff, and some of those beetles are brightly colored, and you never know what you're going to find. I've also seen those little crab spiders, I think, the pink and white ones. I remember seeing those. Those tend to stand out. Not exactly a pollinator, but they're there to maybe catch a pollinator. I think that's part of the reason people get so motivated with these plantings when they're doing them in their home landscapes. It's just amazing what is showing up in these plantings, and it can be different every day. There can be different butterflies, different bees, beetles, so it's great to see that diversity that happens once these plantings are done. I think the one thing that we often don't think about is our nighttime pollinators, our nocturnal pollinators with the moths. When I first started this work, I never really thought about moths being a valuable pollinator, and there's things that you can do to help with distracting them from their job at night of pollinating plants. It's kind of interesting. The moths, the nocturnal pollinators, are fun to think about. Yeah, I forgot about those ones. Okay, so speaking of healthy habitat, we've been hearing a lot about pollinator declines. What's driving these declines, and why should people care? Well, pollinator declines are caused by multiple factors. I think they say death by a thousand cuts or what have you, but one of the biggest ones is habitat loss and degradation. We've seen that through the loss of our remnant prairies. We have 1% remaining, and so part of the idea is to be able to get some of these native plant communities on all sorts of grounds. It really is like planting these little prairies, so connectivity of habitat and habitat loss is the greatest factor. Other factors include pesticide use, climate change, pathogens, and invasive species. So there's a few key reasons that pollinator declines really matter. One is global food security, another is economic stability, and then biodiversity is another one. Insects support around 75% of our flowering plants and about 35% of our global food crops, so it's a huge percent of our crops that they support. Without pollinators, one-third of the human food supply is at risk, and about one out of every three bites of food we eat are because of pollinators, so they're playing that really important role for our food supplies. This includes many nutrient-rich foods like fruits and vegetables and nuts, and things that we really value like coffee, blueberries, and chocolate are included as plants that are pollinated as well. So their loss is really threatening ecosystems, but it's also threatening food systems and our nutrition as well. Perfect. So when we talk about supporting pollinators, we're also talking about protecting our food system, like you mentioned, that has a big impact on that. How do pollinator plantings near gardens and farms impact food production? There's been more research on this topic, and one thing that it's showing is that native bees are helping to increase the fruit size and also the shape of fruit that's produced within gardens, and this is true for apples and blueberries, tomatoes, sunflowers, a wide range of crops that they're supporting. So they're really helping to increase the production and the quality of fruits and vegetables that we're producing. Ultimately, they're helping produce billions of dollars of commodities within the state. There's also some really important benefits related to pest control that they accomplish as well. So this is true with hoverflies and parasitic wasps, that they're natural predators in the landscape, and their agricultural pests, such as soybean aphids, are ones that they'll target, so they can really help with protecting different crops within landscapes. And the one other piece that's really important is just reconnecting our landscapes. Our landscapes are really fragmented, and these plantings help decrease that fragmentation. Even though some of these plantings may not be really large, they're helping to reconnect the landscapes, increasing the ecosystem benefits, and this is sustaining the pollinator populations, and then that's helping out agriculture. So it's kind of a whole system that's being developed. Kind of transitioning a little bit, so there's a program we've mentioned already that's called Lawns to Legumes. It has become a very well-known program in Minnesota. I think I've mentioned it possibly on the podcast a couple times before. But how did this program get started, and what was the idea behind it? Well, the program started back in 2019, and it was really driven by Minnesota's residents' interest in supporting pollinators. There was a lot of news around that time about declines, and residents were really wanting to get engaged. And then this led to state legislation. To develop the program, we had financial support from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, and then more recently, the General Fund. We've had some funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The program is really focused on engaging residents across the state to create high-quality pollinator habitat within their yards. And as we get more and more of this habitat created across landscapes, it's helping to build corridors and reconnect our landscapes ecologically. So really, they're helping to support a wide range of pollinators with the work that residents are doing. We have over 500 species of native bees in the state, and many of them are at risk. Our state bee, the rusty patched bumblebee, has declined about 80% over the last 20 years, and we think those declines may be similar with many other bee species. So we feel like this program is really playing an important role because so many residents are getting involved around the state, establishing plantings, so they're supporting these at-risk species like many of the and monarch butterflies and other species. So the Lawns to Legumes program has supported more than 10,000 pollinator plantings across Minnesota, and based on your experience working directly with residents and partners, what have you learned about what it really takes to help these pollinator plantings succeed over time, from the design, the initial concepts, to long-term management of an established planting? Yeah, that's a great question. I think when I first started doing this work on my own, I'm also a University of Minnesota Extension Master Gardener, volunteer for St. Louis County, and it really, I started by doing and just getting plants and planting them in the ground and doing it all the wrong ways. So I have a lot of experience with doing it the wrong way, but I think what I've learned most importantly is a good design is really important. And so making sure that you're going to be planting these plants in the right space, because that's kind of where I failed a little bit at the beginning was with that, as well as like site prep was really important. So I just assumed like, I want to plant for pollinators, and I'm just going to go buy these plants and find a place for them. And, and really there, I didn't have any resources at that time, or wasn't aware of the resources. And this was like probably eight years ago before this program. And, you know, now this program has just got so many resources. And I think the biggest thing like I had mentioned was a good design. So we have, and early planning is really important. So rather than just running out and grabbing plants and throwing them in the ground, like really thinking thoughtfully about the space of what you're going to be planting them, the site of its current existing state, if it's in turf, or if it's, you know, bare mineral soil, what, how are you going to be doing some site prep. And thank goodness, there's so many resources on our website that have actual templates of where to place these plants, what type of plants to use. There's also a lot of, through the Lawns to Legumes program, we have our coaches, which many of them are actually University of Extension Master Gardeners as well. And so tapping into this peer to peer learning experience, because I think the best way to learn is by doing, but you also don't want to waste resources as far as, you know, the cost of plants and buying them and then, you know, having them die or getting eaten up by weed. So, you know, there's lots of really smart people that have been doing this. Like I mentioned, lots of people have been planting it. So tap into your neighbors that have been doing it. There's, like I said, the Master Gardener program, the Master Water Stewards, Master Naturalists, those are all really good resources to tap into. The Wild Ones chapter also have really, really experienced people who have installed these on different kinds of areas within their yards or schoolyards. So that's really important. So just tapping into existing resources. But then I think from my personal experience, the other failure or thing to really think about is the weed control. So that's really important. And I struggled when I first started with this because it was a little bit challenging for me to identify the weeds versus the plants. And had I followed a template and kind of organized where the plants would be, I would be able to manage those weeds properly. And so that was a big lesson that I learned was, you know, to control the weeds, to reduce competition. And there's, you know, I mean, technology these days has all sorts of apps that you can check to see what the plant is. And those didn't really exist, or I wasn't aware of them, you know, 10 years ago when I started this. So that's really important is the weed suppression. And a good tool for that that we've learned is using wood chips. We really want to avoid using any kind of plastic-based products when we're doing this type of work because we are establishing a conservation habitat area. So another lesson I learned was using plastic like mulch, weed suppression mulch. I'm still digging it up eight years later. It resurfaces, it breaks down, you're going to have this chemistry in your soil that you're trying to, you know, create healthy soil. So wood chips are really important. Some cities actually have like free wood chip piles that you can actually get them delivered to your property for a fairly, you know, fairly cheaper cost than going to a big box store and buying wood mulch or chips from there. So weeding is number one. We always suggest that you do your weeding like three times a year. It's on Mother's Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day. So you can have your family over for a nice picnic and then also have them pull weeds in your native planting. Yeah, have a plant party. Yeah, we're just going to pull up all the plants that we don't want in our pollinator garden. So you mentioned your website. It has lots of pollinator planting and design options on there. So if people want to visit the Bowser website, it is bwsr.state.mn.us slash L2L. That stands for the Lawns to Legumes program. So take a look at that. And yeah, some of those apps are like iNaturalist. I know you can easily take a picture of something and you'll have peers from around the area and experts also chime in on if it is a native plant or if it's a weed, something you should be concerned about, or if it's an invasive species. So if you do find that one of those weeds that happen to pop up in your yard, in your planting, and it may possibly be an invasive and you can't figure out kind of through iNaturalist, you can always let the Department of Agriculture know as well. So we have our report a pest hotline. So that's www.mda.state.mn.us slash report a pest, all one word. So if you do find a weed that looks really bad and just is really taking over everything, let us know and we can help identify that for you as well. And Dan, what else can they find on your website? And how do they get an application for this Lawns to Legumes program? In addition to the resources that are available, there is an application link on the website and that will link into the Metro Blooms website. That's a nonprofit partner that's working with us that is assisting with the program. Programs like Lawns to Legumes rely on community participation. So how can local governments, schools, or community organizations get involved to support pollinators? Well, with the Lawns to Legumes program, part of it was we developed a competitive grant program. And so it started off with called Demonstration Neighborhood and it evolved to our Pollinator Pathways program. And so that was a competitive grant program where communities could get together and work together to create these corridors on multiple spaces. So for example, one of our projects is on the Bee Line, if you're familiar with that. So they would want to connect different neighborhoods through community spaces and through residential spaces as well to make sure we have these corridors for these bumblebees to be pollinating and having habitat. Community conservation is a really important part, I feel like, of establishing these plantings in this habitat. There's so many different amazing groups out there that are doing seed exchanges and just building a sense of community around planting pollinators. So they're gathering together, they're harvesting seed, they're talking about pollinators, and then they're planting in their communities together. And I think that's a really, really important part of this is the people part of it. And because without the people, we're not going to continue this movement of creating this habitat on all landscapes. And one of the other really, really fun things about that Pollinator Pathways program was our ability to work with schools. And so that's been a fun project where we're developing curriculum that focuses on pollinator conservation, and then really trying to help integrate the pollinator conservation in the classroom and outdoor learning space. So we're getting those young, new generational kids to get excited about pollinators and to really keep this momentum going for for generations to come. Yeah, and I have some, my kids are in elementary school and they've had some curriculum on insects also. And so they've been doing some research on butterflies and other, and animals just kind of in general on the whole. And so it's been fun to see see them do some of the work and ask questions. And they, they kind of know from experience of our own pollinator plantings that we have, and that what we see in our own yard, that they can bring it to school for other kids. And they can be like, yeah, I saw this one thing at our, at our, on one of the flowers in our, at our house. And they just get so excited about seeing these tiny little insects, and just how much colorful they are. So yeah. Yeah, it's exciting when you have, you can go for a walk in your neighborhood and just see these native plantings with these native insects all over. It's, you know, city block to city block, you'll find all sorts of different ones. So it's really a, you know, corridor of habitat, but also a corridor of community and people. Yeah, my coworker was saying that her, she has a little planting on in between the sidewalk and the road. And the preschool, the local preschool always in the summer come by and take like a little walk in the neighborhood and stuff. And they always stop and take a look at what's on all of the flowers in that planting, because there's tons of different butterflies. And the kids have just like, it's right at their level. And so they can easily see all these tiny little insects. They're like, oh, look at that one, look at that one. So they get so excited. So invasive plants and insects, we've kind of hinted at a few along the way here. But they can make life even harder for pollinators. From your experience, is there a particular invasive species that really shows how these threats disrupt pollinator habitat? Well, I think it's hard to pick just one. There's, there's a lot of invasive species within our landscapes. And as we're out looking at sites, we're seeing less flower resources available for pollinators. And so we're seeing this within forests and within grassland communities. Species like common buckthorn definitely create a lot of challenges because they're suppressing flowers within forests, but also suppressing shrubs and trees from regenerating. So they're impacting a lot of different species within those plant communities. Within grassland systems, there's a lot of invasive grasses like smooth brown grass is an example of one that will get into prairies and it'll just keep spreading and decrease the number of flowers within a prairie. So those types of species we are concerned about because of the impacts on pollinators. We also have extensive areas of unused lawn within Minnesota. Across the United States, there's around 65 million acres of lawn, which is more than corn crops that we have in the state. So we're always looking for opportunities to do conversion of lawn areas that we're not using. And they can be great areas to increase plant diversity, support pollinators, just support overall biodiversity. For people who want to support pollinators but aren't sure where to begin, what are the first steps to creating pollinator habitats at home? You've mentioned a few like visiting the website, but what simple choices make the biggest difference? Just plant native plants. That's about the simplest thing you can do to start off with is really prioritizing native vegetation in your home. And it can start small. We always tell people, you know, start with a small planting if you're new to gardening and you can expand it. Around 30% of the people participating in the program have been new gardeners. So we've been working with a lot of people that are new to this and learning along the way. Erin mentioned the planting template. So those are really valuable for people who are starting out because you can bring those to a nursery to get plants and then use that for planting. We do recommend pulling somebody in that has experience. So that might be a neighbor or could be a coach through the program, might be a master gardener that can help guide you with your project. Removing existing lawn is really important. We try to stress the importance of starting with a clean slate so that you don't have weed competition. In many cases, this is being done with cardboard to be a layer that can be put over an existing lawn to suppress that lawn. So that's been pretty common or else digging out lawn is another option. We recommend mulching plantings, usually with wood chips to suppress weeds and that'll keep the weeds down for a couple years. We encourage having flower resources through the season. So having plants that bloom in the spring, summer, and fall. And that's something that nurseries can help you with, with selecting plants. Also eliminating pesticides if you can within your yard. And we talk a lot about cues for care, which these are things you can do in the landscape just so that your neighbors know that this is a cared for landscape. So it might be edging around the plantings or could be signage that is identifying the purpose that this is for supporting pollinators. Yeah, I've seen a few of those, like the little metal signs that are just the corrugated plastic signs that say like pollinator planting, like bees are our friends and things like that in the, in the yards. And in specifically those areas that have some of these like large, like just small little plantings in the yards and stuff and be like, okay, it's not just weeds. Like this is, this is an actual purpose to this planting. And it's trying to encourage that the pollinators to be there and then also provide habitat like you're talking about. So it's not so fragmented. So it's nice to see those. And the one thing that I think we sometimes forget about is our fruiting shrubs. So when Dan talks about blooming times, I reside in Duluth and some of the first blooming species are going to be our shrubs, our trees and shrubs. So those are really important ones. So when we talk about native plants, I think sometimes we think about just the vegetative ones, but also recognizing that trees and shrubs are very important, early, early pollinator for those, those queens that are coming out right away in early spring. I'm always excited when I start seeing the first queen bees coming on out and I'm like, oh, yay, spring is here. So what are some of the most important plants that support pollinators? Well, we do have a lot of native species in the state. It's over 2,000 native species. So there's a lot of species that benefit pollinators in different ways. There are some plants that are host plants that are really important for certain butterflies. Their larvae need those host plants. So milkweed is a good example with monarchs. Golden alexanders is another plant that we promote because swallowtail butterflies rely on plants that are in the carrot family. And that's a species that's in the carrot family. Different mints, native mints like giant hyssop or bergamot are really important for rusty patch bumblebee and other bumblebee species. There's a lot of food source there for them. Native shrubs like serviceberry bloom early in the year, as Erin was saying. So they provide really valuable pollen and nectar. Native asters and goldenrods are important in the fall as pollinators are getting ready for winter. So they're a really important food source. And then oak trees are super important in our landscapes. They support over 450 species of wildlife. And there's many caterpillars and butterflies that really benefit from oak trees as a food source during the season. And so what are some of the outcomes that have resulted from all of these plantings that we've had? There have been a lot of outcomes and there's been outcomes related to the pollinator habitat, but then there's also social outcomes with this program as well. With the plantings, there's been over 12,000 that we funded through the program. We think there's probably just as many do-it-yourself projects out there that have been supported by resources for the program. It's been harder for us to track some of those outcomes. About 40% of the projects that have been funded have been in environmental justice areas of the state. So that's an important social part of the