For the past 30 years, Mark de St. Aubin’s home garden in Millcreek has been a little slice of heaven in suburban Utah.
It’s filled with native plants that require little water, like sunflowers and different herbs. At any given moment during the day, he’ll spot a hummingbird feasting at a feeder, or a bumble bee's nose deep within a flower.
“I could spend all day just being in the garden and caring for things. Probably because I know that it's a friendly place for nature. And we see it. We see nature responding to the care that we give.”
While de St. Aubin was planting native and less water intensive plants “before it was in vogue,” the nationwide campaign to Save the Bees mobilized him to turn his backyard into a pollinator sanctuary. The decline in the honeybee population also inspired him to take up beekeeping and integrate certain types of plants into the garden that they know “are bee friendly.”
“We are thoughtful about it. We don't care as long as they are pollinators and they're feeding off of our garden plants. We don't just go for honeybees.”
And not catering to just honeybees may be the right move.
Utah has over 1,000 native bee species and the amplified attention to honeybees is a cause for concern, according to Jim Cane, a retired employee with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and former adjunct faculty at Utah State University. But preserving native bees hasn’t gotten nearly as much buzz as the non-native European honeybee. Cane pointed out there are less native bees this decade than last decade, although it is hard to track all the species because so many of them are solitary and don’t live in a colony like honeybees.
The massive honeybee population, along with destroyed habitats and the prominence of “exotic grasses” like cheatgrass is “death by a thousand cuts” to the native bee population, Cane said, and “it's a slow moving problem.”
With honeybees, a lot of the colonies have been released in forests and Bureau of Land Management land and it’s “gotten to be a problem,” especially in the mountain ranges along the Wasatch Front. He said the native bee population has “never had to compete with honeybees” until now.
“Each [honeybee] colony is fielding 10,000 foragers. It’s like putting a city in the middle of a valley and expecting that it's not going to have an impact. Well, it does on native bees. It simply takes a lot of pollen and nectar away.”
Another concern with the honeybee population infiltrating native bee spaces is its potential to pass along disease – which is the suspected reason for why the honeybee species was dying off in the first place.
Cane said the biggest threat is the loss of habitat that isn’t being restored elsewhere. Native bees rely on wildflowers and plants for nutrients, but Cane said those are disappearing in large quantities. The expansion of cheatgrass and other invasives are “choking out seedlings of native wildflowers,” causing them to grow less and less, which in turn means less food for native bees.
“Habitat loss. Habitat transformation. Pollen and nectar withdrawal. Lesser pollen and nectar on the landscape. None of them are favorable to native bees.”
The biggest pressure to preserve the wildlife habitat native bees rely on, he added, is on state land management agencies. Instead of letting exotic grasses spread, Cane said agencies should be removing it. Or if wildflowers are blooming, don’t replace that landscape with something that will deter native bee health.
“The biggest thing that land management agencies can do is where their flora is in good condition. Do not mess with it. Don't plow it up. After fires, don't go in and plant exotic grasses where there had been intact native flora before,” he said.
Overall, the steps de St. Aubin is taking to preserve the native bee population is a positive one to Cane. Even if it doesn’t repopulate native bees, it keeps them alive for another cycle and it spreads awareness to the benefits of planting native plants made for native species.
But Cane believes there does need to be a change to the messaging about saving the bees.
“We really need to make it ‘Save the wild bees.’”
