Easy Tips for Helping Pollinators NOW

Pollinator Pastures
6 Tips to Turn Your Farm into a Pollinator Haven

Pollinators are in great danger all over the world.  Because bees are critical to our food supply, anyone who eats has an interest in helping them survive.  The good news is that we already know what to do to help them – and that those same actions will help tackle many of the large health and environmental problems we face today.  It is empowering to know that we can all can take small actions that make a HUGE difference.

Pollinator habitat can be included in productive pastures. Many beneficial grazing forage plants have flowers that at different times of year support pollinators. By healing your soil you can create diversity in your fields – so you have year round grazing and pollinators have season long flowers! Plus, these plants provide critical habitat and food for critical allies like birds and spiders – needed for insect and pest control.

The widespread use of chemicals is disrupting the bees’ ability to get the minerals they need to be healthy.  The colonies are “collapsing” from disease for many reasons, but the root of these problems is lack of nutrition.  Luckily, your pastures and lawns and sides of your driveway can provide critical habitat and food for them.The loss of our healthy soil biology has disrupted soil mineral cycling.  Many commonly used chemicals not only harm the microbes that fertilize our plants, but also tie up critical nutrients and further starve the bees.  When an organism is malnourished, a host of diseases and problems arise.

This is the edge of our yard where we stopped mowing. Milkweed is often found in our fields, unmowed edges of yards or fields, and is CRITICAL food for the monarch butterfly on its long migration to breed in South America. It has beautiful flowers and smells HEAVENLY!

Healing these issues, both for the bees and for our own health crisis, involves healing our soil — getting the right microbes back in the soil and our guts.  These microbes are essential — for us and the bees — to create health literally from the ground up!  When we can do this, minerals cycle again, making our immune system healthy and our DNA replicate health instead of disease.  Microbes plus minerals = MAGIC.

Here are some tips to help the bees (and us) thrive!

1. Reduce or eliminate use of chemicals like herbicides, pesticides, insecticides.  For fly control without insecticides, replace chemicals with natural essential oil-based repellents.  Use native beneficial insects like fly predators, and traps specific to the fly you want to catch. Create habitat for songbirds and spiders.

   The best fly control is getting your soil and field habitat healthy enough so that manures break down within days and don’t sit there as habitat for fly and disease and parasite larvae.  The upside of taking this approach is that your pastures will be healthier, more nutrient and energy dense, as well as more productive.  Most often if the manure is sitting on the soil surface there are chemicals or some harmful disturbance to the soil ecology or moisture (like mosing too short so the soil dries out).

   The following are common areas of disturbance in grazing systems – where we find that stopping adding harmful inputs will save money while creating better nutrient cycling and reducing the pest cycle.  It is best to stop spending money and time and get a greater return – multiple benefits from one action (or inaction).

   Don’t spray your fields for weeds.  Weeds are just a stage in land healing.  Instead, what to feed your soil to heal that will prevent weeds from germinating and move into healthy grassland.

   Cut out any non-GMO corn, soy, barley, alfalfa, etc in your animal’s feed.  Remember that herbicide residues in our animal’s feed harm bees also.  These residues are are commonly present at levels that exceed safe levels, and tie up minerals in the gut, which weakens their immune system and body’s ability to function.

2. Stop using dewormer without a fecal test first, and choose natural dewormers that have been proven to work such as walnut hulls, herbs, and essential oils.  Parasites only inhabit animals who are not minerally dense and whose immune systems are not functioning well. Deworming with chemicals will shut down your soil and manure decomposition, so focus on how to create a healthier animal, instead of fighting the parasites that are just messengers that our management is off.

   It is possible, and even essential, to get our farms (and bodies) of of reliance on destructive chemicals, and the outcomes are always better than conventional management with chemicals.  Think of it as creating a healthy system instead of managing dis-ease.  Find someone who knows how to do this to show you.

3. Reduce or eliminate mowing – or mow HIGHER (12” if you can).  This allows plants to flower.  If you have to mow, leave flowers in the critical time periods when the bees really need food (early spring and late fall).  It is better to use the animals to trample and stomp the litter into contact with the soil than to mow and leave it to oxidize on top.  The animals will naturally leave some plants tall and those can flower for pollinators and provide habitat for spiders and songbirds – while still feeding the soil well.
4. Leave patches or strips un-mowed.  We all have corners of our property or yard where we can leave patches for pollinators, while still being able to mow critical boundaries and keep the brush away.

   You will likely be surprised to find out how beautiful these flowers and plants are that come up when you don’t mow.  Go out and see them with the morning dew glistening – not only is it exquisitely beautiful, you will see how during times of drought these plants collect water from the air and will keep your pastures healthier by infiltrating water down to the ground.

5. Create Year-Round Food for the bees – if you don’t have flowers year round, put out some honey or syrup and mix it with micronized minerals and probiotic cultures of microbes for the bees.  Get the recipes for free at the link below.  Research shows that combining the microbes, minerals with the sugar reduces the death rates tremendously, plus the bees become larger, more docile, and the honey is a higher quality and quantity (which will help the hive have enough food to last through winter).

   Feeding the bees is especially important if warm spells happen during winter and you see the bees out but there are no plants flowering. Climate change is causing premature warm spells during winter, which tricks the bees into coming out too early.  This uses up their winter energy stores.  You can help by supplementing during these hard times so they can live until spring.

6. Learn to appreciate and cultivate a different sense of beauty than the perfectly manicured mowed lawn and edging. Nature’s design and patterning is exquisite and as beautiful as high-priced landscaping.  Plus it changes each year!

   The beauty and vibrancy that nature creates in un-mowed patches will delight your senses and provide vital food for bees, plus habitat for beneficial insects like dragonflies, birds, and spiders that eat mosquitoes, ticks and flies.  Even as these “weeds” are dying, dig up their roots to see how they feed microbes and earthworms like crazy as they decompose.  This reduces compaction and allows water channels to hydrate your soil more deeply.

Who knew that managing for bees would also help you manage for drought and flood by creating better soil, which directly saves costs and creates more profit?… reduce threats of parasites and infectious disease…and provide more nourishment and less chronic disease for ourselves?

Helping the soil and pollinators truly improves the “triple” bottom line.  How wonderful and cost effective it is when the same set of actions tackles many of the toughest problems that we face today?  It is well worth the time to make small modifications in your system to create big positive impact.