Pollinator Habitat and Study Findings
Natural pollinator habitats are diverse. Depending on the species, you can find pollinators in mud holes, forests, branches, dead wood, and even burrowed harmlessly in the pruned branches of your blueberry bushes. Blueberry fields with bordering forested areas offer especially good habitat and tend to have an abundance of pollinators, as these areas offer nesting sites and alternative food outside of blueberry bloom.
The picture on the right shows a row of nesting holes in a ridge next to a gravel road. You can see the nearby blueberry field in the top right corner of the image. Click the image for a closer view of these holes.
During the 2009 season, we scouted 16 fields in southwest Washington, the Willamette Valley and northwestern Oregon using the scouting guidelines outlined on the Preliminary scouting guidelines page.
We found that the farther a blueberry plot is from native habitat, the fewer native pollinators will be observed. (See bar graph below). This means that bushes on the edge of plots and closest to uncultivated habitat are likely to have more native pollinator activity than the areas of the field that are farthest from such habitat. The observations from our survey correspond to previous studies of native pollinators in agriculture that have found more native populations around field edges due to better nesting sites and alternative forging sources. (Cane, 2001, Tuell et al., 2009)
In our survey, the number of pollinators found in mid-field plots was just shy of the number found nearest natural habitat. This could mean that our mid-field plots were not so distant from the natural habitat that pollinators weren't willing to venture there. We found the fewest native pollinators in the plots we labeled "far from native habitat".
Importance of native habitat near fields
Fields with obvious uncultivated habitat tended to have high native pollinators populations. It was evident that some fields surveyed had far less natural habitat than others. For example, intensely farmed fields and fields that had a border of cultivated grass fields on all sides had many fewer native pollinators than fields with nearby forested areas.
Field abutting forest. |
Fields lacking nearby wild/uncultivated areas. |
Copyright 2009 ~