When it comes to gardening, sometimes the best thing you can do is … nothing. That’s advice from UM entomologists Jason Gibbs and Cecil Montemayor Aizpurúa, who say that leaving nature to its own devices can be the key to a thriving, biodiverse garden.
Something you can to support pollinators is to keep and enhance the habitat you have, notes Gibbs, who is an associate professor in entomology.
Fruiting trees, flowering shrubs and plants, fruits and vegetables, herbs, flowers, grasses or ground covers such as clover, as well as surrounding natural or forested areas, provide important habitat areas for pollinators. Gibbs emphasizes that bee diversity beyond honeybees — which often receive sole credit for pollination — is what truly matters. Though most of Canada’s commercial honey is sourced from the Prairies, wild bees are bigger contributors to pollination than managed bees.
In fact, Manitoba is home to around 400 species of bees, including mason bees, mining bees and the tiny and ubiquitous sweat bees, each playing a unique role in pollination.
“So having 10 sweat bees is not as good as having a sweat bee, a mason bee, a miner bee, a honeybee, and a bumblebee,” Gibbs explains. Studies show that apple orchards with a wide variety of bee species produce bigger and better fruit.
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