Nature is Resilient, But Only So Much

Chapman's goldenrod - September 24, 2019

Rudbeckia hirta - September 24, 2019
Nature is resilient to our mistakes, but it only goes so far. It has been about a week since the total collapse of my pollinators and some of them have returned. The tiny sweat bees, for example, have returned but in far fewer numbers than were here before. A single deltoid scarab beetle and aa grass skipper were here today as well, but my aster-type blooms are still mostly being visited by lovebugs.  Disparage these insects all you want, but they are doing the job that was once done by at least a dozen species of bees and without them I'm not sure anything right now would get pollinated.  I have the luxury of being able to garden most days of the week - my teaching schedule puts me in the classroom right now only two days a week and even then, I have a few hours in the morning to take in what is happening in my landscape.  It has been a very slow road to recovery here.
I trust that whatever was done to my pollinators will eventually be undone with time, but how long this will take is a question that remains to be answered. Wildflowers have evolved to be pollinated by insects and that bond was forged hundreds of thousands of year ago. It is a relationship that could always be counted on, but our modern world is making it a tenuous one as we wage war on insects across vast areas of the world on a daily basis. It is a war we are slowly winning, but one that will wreak havoc on us as time goes by unless we change tactics. Pollinator numbers worldwide are plummeting. We need pollinators (and other insects) nearly as much as our plants do and we cannot afford to continue with the wholesale assault on them with our modern use of pesticides that target everyone of them. If my area of the world was recently sprayed to kill mosquitoes as I suspect, it has killed virtually everything else.  There has to be a better way and we need to adopt a different approach. Nature has always allowed us to make these mistakes in the past by rebounding, but each time we dip into that well, we set it back a bit further. I do not know where a reservoir exists that will someday repopulate my landscape. Here in my suburban desert of non-native plants, turf grass lawns, and gravel landscapes, there are few potential reservoirs for native bees and butterflies. 
I will continue to watch and wait. I'm counting on nature to once again forgive what was done here, but for now I am almost back to where I started; waiting for bees to repopulate my landscape. We can plant all the pollinator plants we want, but it won't change the status of pollinators if we continue with our modern approach to insecticides. 

Comments

  1. StoryHatSeptember 25, 2019 at 9:18 AM

    Amen! I want to smash things when I see the aisles of poison in both the big box and smaller gardening centers. Understand now we need to worry about our neighbors using "backyard mosquito control" - the lawn spraying trucks are bad enough!

    I've been feeling for you and hoping your pollinators do return in their previous diversity and numbers. Not long after reading your first post about this, we were given a one-day warning about an aerial spraying by mosquito control in our area! As it turns out, my immediate neighborhood was not targeted. Now, however, I know how to check mosquito control's schedule on a handy internet map. If we do get targeted, though, there's absolutely nothing we can do to stop it. Sigh.

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