Pollinators make a difference

Bees are often the first pollinators people name because they do the heavy lifting. However, hummingbirds are the most common pollinators in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

Other animals out there making the system work by going after a flower’s nectar or pollen include: beetles, butterflies, moths, wasps, ants and bats.

Will Richardson, executive director and co-founder of the Tahoe Institute for Natural Science, recently gave a talk titled “Tahoe’s high-altitude helpers: The secret lives of Sierra pollinators” at the behest of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center.

“Pollinators exist in large part due to a lot of constraints that plants have by being stuck in the ground. When you’re rooted to the ground, that means that there’s a lot of challenges that you may face trying to find mates and reproducing, trying to get away from competitors, trying to get away from things that want to eat you, herbivores, right?” Richardson said. “Pollination is one attempt to try to get around the challenges of finding mates and the reproducing part of that equation. And a lot of plants adopt the strategy of just cranking out a ton of pollen and casting their fate to the wind, literally.”

A butterfly searches for nectar in a flower. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

A plant like the yucca needs a specific pollinator—the yucca moth. Some pollinators need a certain plant. Others are generalists, meaning the plant doesn’t care who comes calling and the animal doesn’t care who provides the pollen.

Agave, and blue agave in particular, requires the long-nosed bat. That blue agave is what can become tequila.

Richardson said to attract beetles, plant corn lilies in your garden or a bowl shaped flower. Hummingbirds love the color red and tubular plants. July is when hummingbirds are most prolific in Tahoe.

“They get incredibly territorial. You see them fighting at a hummingbird feeder,” Richardson said. “Hummingbirds are crazy. They’re completely psychotic, fighting over this huge food source, but they cannot help it because they have evolved to vigorously defend these nectars during migration.”

Yarrow, he said, is great for one’s yard because an array of pollinators love it.

Even the somewhat odd looking snow plants have pollen to share. Hummingbirds love them because they are red. Big swallowtail butterflies also find these plants attractive.

Butterflies need something to hold on to—a platform of sorts—like lilies.

“Butterflies can see a ridiculous number of colors. Who knows what their visual world looks like, but it’s got to be something,” Richardson said.

That’s one reason colorful gardens often seem to be swarming with butterflies. Moths and butterflies are searching for nectar.

“If you go look at a group of manzanita flowers that’s been out for a while, you will see that they’re riddled with holes and that’s from nectar robbers,” Richardson said. “And there’s a lot of bugs, smaller bees, honey bees, even some big bumblebees, wasps, all kinds of stuff are basically chewing holes through the base of the thing to get to the nectar.”

Ants do minimal pollination. Richardson said they are better at moving seeds around.

“Bees will eat anything. They are the absolute champion pollinators. They do need the pollen. They are feeding their young pollen,” Richardson said. “I’ve seen a lot of estimates, but around 80 to 85 percent of all flowering plants recruit bees to do at least some, if not all, of their work.”

For Tahoe, honey bees are a nonnative pollinator.

“We are having a bit of a pollinator crisis. We’re having a legitimate insect crisis,” Richardson said. “A lot of that is due to habitat loss. We don’t fully understand what role pesticides have, but they are getting a lot of blame and probably rightly so.”

Richardson said the best thing people can do is grow native plants to attract native pollinators.

Note: A version of this story first appeared in the Tahoe Mountain News.