Bats are beautiful and essential

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Why Bats Are So Important

There are so many misconceptions out there about bats. Bats are not evil, blood-thirsty creatures that fly around at night trying to get caught in your hair. They are graceful and fascinating nocturnal creatures, which benefit humans by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, and feeding on insect pests. In fact, over 300 species of fruit depend on bats for pollination including mangoes, bananas and guavas, carob, peaches and balsa wood. They are excellent pest managers eating up to 1,200 mosquitoes in one hour and in the wild they can live for up to 20 years.

Worldwide, at least 67 plant families and over 500 species of flowers rely on bats as their major or exclusive pollinators. Bats certainly play an important role in keeping the insect populations in check by eating insects. They consume damaging pests that attack a host of commercial crops. Nectar-feeding bats are also essential pollinators. Bats are often considered “keystone species” that are essential to some tropical and desert ecosystems. Without bats’ pollination and seed-dispersing services, local ecosystems could gradually collapse as plants fail to provide food and cover for wildlife species near the base of the food chain.

Bats are able to pollinate the flowers of plants that have evolved to produce nectar to attract them. When they drink the sweet nectar inside flowers they pick up a dusting of pollen and move it along to other flowers as they feed. Scientists believe that many groups of plants have evolved to attract bats since they are able to carry such large amounts of pollen in their fur compared to other pollinators. The ability of bats to fly long distances is also another benefit to plants, especially those plants that occur in low densities or in areas far apart from each other.

Flowering plants have developed several traits to attract these flying mammals. Bats use sight, smell and echolocation to locate flowers. Many of the flowers that rely on bats for pollination are white or light-colored to show up in the evening and night times. Many of the flowering plants have evolved a strong fruity or musty or rotten perfume. The smell is created by sulfur-containing compounds, which are uncommon in most floral aromas but have been found in the flowers of many plant species that specialize in bat pollination. Some plant species have even evolved acoustic features in their flowers that make the echo of the bat’s ultrasonic call more conspicuous to their bat pollinators enabling them to easily find the flowers in dense growth.
Other interesting stuff!

-Tequila is made from the agave plant, which relies solely on bats to pollinate its flowers and reproduce. Without bats, we would have no tequila.

-Anoura fistulata, a nectar-feeding bat from South America, which has the longest tongue (proportionally) of all mammals. A. fistulata is only the size of a mouse, but its tongue is around 8.5 centimeters long, making it up to 150% of its body length! With such a long tongue it couldn’t possibly keep all of it in its mouth. Instead, A. fistulata keeps the tongue in its chest, in a cavity between the heart and sternum.

-Bats almost exclusively pollinate wild bananas, which originate from Southeast Asia. Bats pollinate many ecologically and economically important plants from around the world. The products that we value from these plants are more than just fruits, including fibers and timbers that we use every day.
-Flying foxes, nectar and fruit-eating megabats from Australia, pollinate the dry eucalyptus forests, which provide us with timber and oils that are shipped around the world.

-Many tropical and sub-tropical rainforest ecosystems also rely on bat pollinators to regenerate. Without nectar-feeding bats not only would our environment suffer, but our way of living as well! Bats are so effective at dispersing seeds into ravaged forest lands that they’ve been called the “farmers of the tropics.” Seeds dropped by bats can account for up to 95 percent of the first new growth.

Bats can be found in almost every part of the world except in extremely hot and cold climates. They live on all continents except Antarctica. You can find more species of bats where the weather is nice and warm. Bats like to roost in groups in dark and humid environments. They also roost in different structures, such as the underside of bridges, in caves, inside roves of buildings, in cracks in between rocks, in mines, and in tree hollows.

Unfortunately, because of human misunderstanding, as well as practices such as habitat destruction and indiscriminate use of pesticides, many bat species are endangered, and some have already gone extinct. In the United States, nearly 40% of the native bat species are endangered.

Click on the links below for more great info!

Info on how to safely & humanely remove a bat from your home:
Build your own Bat House!
Bring a Bat program into your School:
Bat Coloring Pages:

The Native Bumble

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All About the Bumblebee

by Summer Sugg

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s—it’s…a bumblebee? This seems to be more than fitting, seeing as this pollinator’s genus name, Bombus, literally means “booming”, or “buzzing” in Latin. Anyone who’s had a garden in Colorado, or hiked in its wildflower filled landscapes can testify to the astounding amount of noise a bumblebee can make while zooming past your head. It definitely caught me off guard when I got the amazing opportunity to work with the bumblebees in the field with two biology professors at CU (Diana Oliveras and Carol Kearns) during the summer months as research.

I’m sure many of you know what a bumblebee looks like, but what I never knew before my research experience was that there are more colors than just black and yellow to a particular species of bumblebee. The abdominal segments (6 on a female, 7 on male) are where the color is located and can contain orange, white, rufous red, and even brown pile (fur) with the yellow and black depending on the species.

Female bumblebees are very interesting, especially the long life of the queen (one year or longer) who first mates, then overwinter to emerge in the spring with a mission to gather and find a good place for a hive to lay her eggs. The workers are also female, have stingers that can sting something as many times as it wants without dying, and are much smaller than the queen (except for when the new queen is chosen and leaves the hive with the males). Male bumblebees are also interesting, and some people who are good at identifying the males can scoop them up with their bare hands to examine them. The males have no stingers or corbiculae (female’s shiny area of the back legs’ femur surrounded by stiff hairs to carry pollen) and sometimes loiter on flowers or branches with their large humorous bug eyes.

Female (left) vs. Male (right)—different species, but you can see the characteristics. (http://bugguide.net)

Another interesting fact is how bumblebees are native to North America with 23 species found in Colorado alone, while honeybees are of European origin and are only a single species. The experience of working with them and this new knowledge also gave me more appreciation towards our native pollinators, especially bumblebees who are the primary players in helping to pollinate some of Colorado’s (and other state’s) native wildflowers, such as the shooting star anthers (as pictured below). This is due to their large size, enabling them to literally buzz out the pollen, which other non-native pollinators cannot do.

(http://beetlesinthebush.wordpress.com/2010/07/)

Sources:

Book: “The Natural History of Bumblebees—A sourcebook for Investigations” by Carol A. Kearns and James D. Thompson

Websites: http://www.colostate.edu/Dept/bspm/extension%20and%20outreach/Bumble%20Bees.pdf http://beetlesinthebush.wordpress.com/2010/07/

Honeybee Facts

One more thing Bees and Humans have in common: We’re Addicted.

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Bees Have Their Addictions Too

by Sandy Swegel

Nature magazine published a scientific study with the odd news that bees, when given a choice, prefer nectar with the neonic pesticides in them. Given a choice, even though scientists don’t think bee can smell or taste the pesticide, bees opt for neonic-treated plants or neonic-treated sugar solutions. Why? It’s because of the “nics.” The nics in neonics are nicotine compounds. A bee sipping on a flower gets the same rush as human dragging on a cigarette. Wow! We really have to get this substance out of the environment.

The study looks at both honey bees and wild bees. Both wanted the nicotine hit.

Of course, it was just last year that Science magazine reported that bees get addicted to caffeine too and prefer nectar and flowers with caffeine over other nectar.

 

Bees and Humans both love our drugs.

Earlier in the week, I was feeling hopeful because about 90% of the plants at our local Home Depot were neonic-free. Last year virtually all of them had been treated with the pesticide, but Home Depot is requiring more and more of its growers to be neonic-free. That’s hundreds of thousands of plants in our area.

But the Nature article shows us that while we can enjoy the small victories, but we have to keep paying attention to who is silently poisoning our environment.

We know you are our allies with the bees. You use our untreated seeds and you plant our wildflower mixes. Let’s keep up the good fight.

 

 

http://mappingignorance.org/2014/01/27/bees-are-coffee-addicts-too/

http://www.tattoojohnny.com/search/cigarette

No Neonics: Three Easy Ways to Help

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Protecting Yourself and Creatures from Pesticides

by Sandy Swegel

Just a moment to be serious now. Spring has arrived and stores are filling with bedding plants and seeds. At the same time, homeowners are noticing all the weeds in yards and some still go out to buy weed killer.

There are three easy quick things you can do that make a difference to help protect bees and yourself from the “neonic” pesticides.

Learn One Name

Imidacloprid
That’s the neonic most likely in retail products. If you’re an overachiever, the other names are Clothianidin, Thiamethoxam, Acetamiprid, Dinotefuran. These are ingredients in weed killers, especially products marked Bayer or with names like Systemic or Max. Just check your labels and don’t buy these.

Watch For the Label

Customer pressure led Home Depot and Lowe’s last year to agree to put labels on all plants treated with neonics. The label is deceptive….makes it sound like neonics are better…but watch for the label.

Ask Your Retailer

There’s no government regulation (Alas!) that says neonics have to be labeled. The best thing you can do is ask at the garden center if the plants you are buying have been treated with neonics. If they don’t know…then you can probably assume the plants have been sprayed. The treatments can last up to two months in your garden…making your pretty flowers potentially lethal to bees that land on them.

Every time you ask a garden center employee or a grower if their plants have been treated with neonics, you are educating them. That’s what we are after. Nobody really wants to harm bees or the environment. Two years ago when I asked a major grower here in the Denver area if they used neonics, the owner looked at me like I was some crazy Boulder liberal. Which of course I am. He said, “Bah humbug, there’s no way to grow plants without neonics.” But last week, his greenhouse (Welby) had an open house in which they proudly said that most of their plants were grown without neonics and they were continuing to work on how to get neonic-free.

Oh, and of course there’s a fourth thing to do to help the bees. Grow your own plants from good non-pesticide treated, non-GMO, often organic, often heirloom, always neonic-free seeds like ours!
For lots of info on neonics in consumer products, you can read this pdf put out by Xerces.
http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/NeonicsInYourGarden.pdf

Photo Credit
http://ecowatch.com/2015/02/10/global-ban-bee-killing-neonics/

 

Saving the Monarch—one yard at a time

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How You Can Save the Monarch

by Sandy Swegel

Native plant advocate Doug Tallamy tells a wonderful story about how the Atala butterfly was saved from the brink of extinction.

“…the Atala butterfly was thought to be extinct in the 1970s. Then landscapers started placing the insect’s food source, a native plant called the coontie, around houses – not to help the butterfly – but because the plant was attractive in home landscapes. The result – a butterfly thought to be extinct found the suburban plants and today appears to be on the rebound.”

 

The greatest challenge for the monarch butterfly has been the loss of habitat across all of its migratory path. The monarch only feeds and lays eggs on one kind of plant: milkweed. Milkweed is considered a weed by Big Ag, and large farming operations have done their best to kill all the weeds including milkweed. Highway departments also have helped eliminate habitat as they found it was cheaper to pour weedkiller on roadsides rather than mow.

It’s difficult for us as individuals to change Big Ag, or highway departments or to stop deforestation in the Mexican winter habitat monarch. But the story of the Atala butterfly suggests that the monarch can be brought back from its hurdle toward extinction. And we, in individual suburban and city yards, can do something. We can plant native milkweed, a beautiful flowering plant, in our own gardens. Our hope will be that the monarch will figure out that the milkweeds are now in a new place…our individual yards…rather than along highways and farms.

For the last couple of years, I’ve lived in the city where my yard has space for maybe two milkweed plants if I smoosh them together. It seems like a pretty tiny impact I can make. It’s hard to buy milkweed plants in garden centers, so I have to grow from seed. What I’m doing this year is germinating the entire packet of seeds in little pots. After I plant my two plants, I’ll give the other baby plants to as many of my neighbors as I can and ask them to grow the plants. With any luck, our entire block (or two) will have milkweeds growing that will be beacons to overflying monarchs. It might be hard for the monarchs to see one or two plants in my yard….but I think they’ll notice a whole neighborhood worth of milkweed.

Habitat restoration on a grand scale is a great idea. But I feel powerless as an individual to accomplish that. But in the meantime, maybe we can offer new habitat in our collective yards. I can grow out a packet of seeds and change my neighborhood.

Another quote from Tallamy:
If half of the American lawns were replaced with native plants, we would create the equivalent of a 20 million acre national park – nine times bigger than Yellowstone, or 100 times bigger than Shenandoah National Park.

If you have more space in your yard, Tallamy tells about a great experiment in Delaware where researches planted Common Milkweed in a naturalistic planting in a 15′ x 15′ plot. That plot produced 150 monarchs in one season.

Let’s create this new hidden monarch habitat in our yards. Whether you have two square feet like me or space for a 15′ x 15′ plot, you can help save monarchs from extinction. One yard, one packet of seeds, one plant at a time, we can provide food and a place to raise baby monarchs.

Photo Credit:

Celebrating Native Plants: A Profile of Doug Tallamy

http://www.butterflyfunfacts.com/atala.php

7 great reasons to put up some bat houses this weekend.

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Help House the Bats

by Sandy Swegel

Need a project this weekend while you’re waiting for winter to finish? How about building a bat house, or just installing one in the eaves of your house. This is an excellent weekend project and there are lots of great reasons for sharing your property with bats.

7. Bats eat mosquitos. Each bat can eat 500 mosquitos just in the first hour after dark. Think about bats eating all the mosquitos in your backyard or near your grill. That’s 500 fewer possible bites on you!

6. Bats eat bad bugs.
In addition to mosquitos, bats also eat garden pests like rootworms and cucumber beetles.

5. Bats are a lot like us. They are mammals like we are. They have long life spans and can live as long as 40 years. It’s a myth that they are dangerous dirty creatures carrying rabies. They clean themselves constantly (like cats). They don’t bite unless you try to pick them up. Raccoons, skunk and fox are much more likely to have rabies.

4. Bats need our help. Suburban development has wiped out lots of the natural wild habitat of bats. Female bats, like humans, generally only have one baby per season. They need a home to keep their only baby safe and keep the species going. Nearly 40% of American bat species are in severe decline or already listed as threatened or endangered. Spring is bat mating season, so hurry up with the new house.

 

3. Bats make gardener’s gold, i.e. bat guano. Bat poop is an excellent fertilizer. In the days before growing marijuana became legal and high tech, weird hippy guys would come into our garden center every Spring to pay cash for the 50-pound bags of bat guano we ordered every year just for them.

2. Bats give us tequila. Yep, bats are the pollinators for blue agave, the tequila plant! No bats, no new blue agave plants, no summer margaritas.

1. Bats are super cool to watch on summer evenings. You can see bats in the magic hour between sunset and full darkness. They fly erratically in the darkening sky, flitting and diving for insects.

Here’s one link to building your own bat house or you can buy bat-approved houses or bat house kits from Amazon or your local wildlife store.

http://www.batconservation.org/bat-houses/build-your-own-bat-house

Windowsill Arrangements

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Why You Need Windowsill Arrangements

by Sandy Swegel

“It’s strange the way, after a while, we seem to stop looking out the windows of our home.” This clever observation by Nancy Ross Hugo led her to many days of creating tiny arrangements of flowers on her windowsill. She muses, “when you’re arranging on the windowsill, the backdrop (the scene outside the window), almost insists on being seen.”

I recently ran across Nancy’s blog of windowsill arrangements (and a book just published) and just fell in love with the idea of these small whimsical arrangements of nature. Growing up in traditions of the deep South, my family often had little bud vases of a single bloom in the guest bedroom or the bathroom counter. I like windowsill arrangements because they draw on that same idea of delicate touches of natural beauty dotted here and there throughout the house. I also like that a windowsill arrangement unites the creativity of using found pieces and perhaps a single flower with the use of an unusual container such as a bud vase or perhaps a crystal glass or a china egg cup or a mini terrarium. I also like it that windowsill arrangements don’t cost much.

 

Give windowsill arranging a try. You don’t have to be a great artist to create a lovely bit of art that unites the backdrop of your outdoors with a bit of beauty and color right on your windowsill. Delightful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credits: http://windowsillarranging.blogspot.com
Book: http://www.amazon.com/Windowsill-Art-One-Kind-Arrangements/dp/0989268853

 

Early Spring Flowers for Pollinators

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Why to Plant These Wildflower Seeds

by Sandy Swegel

Hungry pollinators are starting to wake up. Well, maybe not this week in Colorado if they are smart. We still have a foot of old snow on the ground, but the sun will come out later this week and I expect to see the first crocuses poke out from the melting snow.

The first warm days of Spring bring out lots of our pollinator friends. In a long winter like this, honey supplies are running short and honeybees are eager for fresh food. Wild bees and bumblebees who don’t have honey stores are very hungry. Ladybugs that woke up a few weeks ago and have been eating aphid eggs in the leaf litter are eager for some sweet nectar or pollen. Everybody’s hungry and are flocking to the first flowers to gather nectar and protein. They need to build up their own strength and to provide food for Spring babies.

 

You can spot some of the first pollinators of the season if you look closely at the first Spring bulbs. Plan to plant more flowers for pollinators in your garden if you want to attract more. You can lure pollinators to your yard by having the first flowers. Then they’ll stay for the rest of the season if you have flowers in bloom all year.

 

Some of the easiest spring flowers to grow are:
Crocus
Snowdrops
Grape hyacinths
Daffodils
Tulips, especially native tulips.

Little bulbs like snowdrops and grape hyacinths re-seed themselves and naturalize a good-sized patch. If you don’t have these in your own yard, it’s easy dig up a few bulbs from a friend’s overgrown patch and transplant into your own garden. They don’t mind the transplanting too much and will bloom as usual…attracting more pollinators to your yard.

So bend down close to those little crocus flowers to see our pollinator friends. Bring a camera. The bees get groggy from gorging on pollen and are often moving pretty slowly, so it’s easy to get a good picture.

 

Photo credits:
Mason bee on crocus: http://www.earthtimes.org/scitech/saving-bees-new-pesticide/2612/

Bee on tulip: http://matthewwills.com/tag/honey-bees/

Bee on muscari and fly on snowdrop: http://urbanpollinators.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/more-early-spring-flowers-for.html

To make your pollinator garden click here!

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A Valentine’s Day Gift for the Bees

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Bee Love

by Sandy Swegel

Nothing like Valentine’s Day to make us think about who and what we love. If we look at the huge number of Facebook “likes” we get when Mike posts about bees or wildflowers, we know our followers have a special love for wildflowers and for the bees and other pollinators who feast on wildflowers.

So how about we all do something special for bees this Valentine’s Day and plant a special Wildflower Patch for them that is a food source both beautiful and safe. A wildflower garden can be a whole meadow or it can be a tiny corner of your garden. Size isn’t as important as a good source of food that’s grown from seed naturally.

 

We’ve written here before about the dangers of the neonicotinoid pesticides (now more easily named neonics.) The bottom line is that if you buy plants, it is likely they were treated with neonics at some point in the greenhouses where they are propagated and grown for sale. Neonics are good killers and control the aphids, mealy bugs, scale and thrips that plague crowded unnatural greenhouse conditions. It’s much for expensive for big growers to treat pests naturally when mass spraying of neonics takes care of the problem for them cheaply. The cost to the bees doesn’t factor into the budget.

But for bees, it’s starting to look like even small amounts of neonic residue left in plants can hurt them. See the link below for the Harvard study that found that healthy bees that were exposed to even sublethal doses of neonics were significantly less likely to survive winter.

The only way to protect the bees until neonics are outlawed here as they are in Europe is to make sure they have natural sources of flowers that are grown from seeds instead of from purchased plants. And the best plants to grow are the ones bees have evolved with: Wildflowers. Anyone who gardens that knows that Wildflowers are a real “if you plant it they will come” experience. Every pesticide free wildflower you plant will be covered with happy bees.

So our Valentine’s message is this:02.13.15-VDay-FB
“Bees, We Love you. We want to show you our love in a time-honored way humans have always shown love: we want to feed you lots of good food: the pollen and nectar from naturally grown wildflowers. We want you to be healthy and happy and share many more Valentine’s Days with us.”

Harvard study:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/study-strengthens-link-between-neonicotinoids-and-collapse-of-honey-bee-colonies/
Photo credit:
http://www.sweetcomments.net/picture/valentines-day/bee-valentine.gif.html

Pick More Daisies

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Daisy Love

by Sandy Swegel

Every January in the middle of some snowstorm, I find a good reason to wander the BBB Seed warehouse to marvel (and covet) huge sacks of seeds waiting to be sorted into packets. There are big sacks of grasses and tiny bags of rare alpine wildflowers. I noticed this year that a whimsical employee who loves daisies had created a shelf of shoeboxes of different seeds that all looked like daisies. What a great idea for a cutting garden!

I started a simple search on our website to see how many daisy or daisy-like flowers we carried and I soon discovered that we are quite obsessed with daisy-type flowers. I found eight flowers named “daisy” and the number soon reached over 25 when I included flowers that look like daisies.

There are good reasons to love daisies beside the fact that they are adorable. Many daisies are also drought tolerant, native, not subject to many pests or diseases and are favorite nectar sources for butterflies and bees.

A short list to get you started on a daisy garden are the flowers with a daisy in their names:

Yellow Daisy (Chrysanthemum multicaule)
Daisy, Shasta – (Leucanthemum maximum)
Daisy, Painted – (Glebionis carinatum)
Daisy, Gloriosa – (Rudbeckia hirta, gloriosa)
Daisy, English – (Bellis perennis)
Daisy, Aspen – (Erigeron speciosus)
Daisy, African – (Dimorphotheca aurantiaca)
Orange Mountain Daisy (Helenium hoopseii)

Then you can move on to the daisy-like flowers such as
Orange and red gaillardia,
Purple and pink echinacea,
Blue and purple asters, and
Two annuals much beloved in American gardens:
Cosmos in pink and white and candy stripe and Zinnias in all colors and sizes.
Finally, cap the season with Sunflowers!

All I can say is, “Hey, Head Honcho Mike! We have a seed mix of poppies (Parade of Poppies). Maybe we need a seed mix next year, “Field of Daisies!”

Photo credit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteraceae
http://www.visualphotos.com/image/2×3894130/a_child_picking_daisies

Pick More Daisies
Best Heirloom Vegetables
Wildflower and Grass Mixes
Native Grasses
Wildflowers