Welcome, everyone, to Midday Magazine, have your host James J. Mailoff here, and we're
welcoming into the WFHR stage, one of our favorite people, Anna Mitchell, with UW-Madison
Extension Wood County.
She is the Regional Natural Resource Educator over there, and it's good to see you.
Good to see you, James.
Thanks for being here, as always.
Really do appreciate the time you're with us.
I know, well, for one, my father loves these interviews, but I know a lot of our listeners
really appreciate sometimes they're learning things and sometimes they're hearing something
that's kind of confirming things for them.
And then there's talking about subjects that we don't necessarily get a chance to really
dive into very often.
That's kind of where we're going today with pollinators.
Yeah, I know pollinators is a really popular topic, but I don't think we dive as deep
into it as what we probably should.
We just hear, save the birds, save the bees, save butterflies, which is wonderful, right?
But let's dive into a little bit more of the why and what pollinators are.
You know, especially with no more may going on for many communities, and this is something
that I think a lot of us here at the station deal with when we're really promote as really
big supporters of no more may, and sometimes you hear from people, why by no more may in
that.
And I think some of this might explain and answer some of that for me.
I sure hope so.
So what are pollinators?
Yeah, so pollinators are anything that help carry pollen from a male part of the flower
known as the stamen to the female part of another flower, which is known as a stigma.
And I did check.
We can't say that on the air.
Oh, okay.
I'm joking.
Yeah.
So pollinators basically help any plant that needs kind of flowers or just any pollination
to reproduce.
So the movement of this pollen must occur for a plant to become fertilized and produce
fruit, seeds, young plants.
If some plants are self pollinating, while others may be fertilized by pollen carried
by the wind or water, but a lot of plants are reliant on pollinators like insects and
animals to help them reproduce or produce their fruit.
In fact, pollinators enable the production, the reproduction of 85% of all flowering plants
and 67% of agricultural crops, yeah.
According to the importance of pollinators, yeah.
Because of their importance to the ecosystem, we can refer to pollinators as a keystone species,
which means that they're an organism that helps hold the ecosystem together.
So without pollinators, our ecosystems would fall and they're of keystone species and almost
all of our ecosystems in this world.
You know, anybody who's watched a disaster movie, like, like, knows how this goes.
Like, you know, if we lose one of these things and all seriousness, there's a reason
like a young in grade school, we learn about the food chain and we learn about these things.
I think that as we get older, we might forget some of that stuff, but it's called a chain
for a reason.
Every link matters without missing one.
It's not connected.
Right.
And those keystone species, man, they are very, very, and, yeah, they are very important.
And it comes to the number, again, the reasons for these pollinators.
Why they are so important, if we can touch a little bit more on that.
Yep.
So there's a couple of reasons why we want to think of pollinators as really important.
So one that is really relevant to us is food production.
Actually, one out of every three bites of food you eat exists because of pollinators and
their efforts.
Like, I'm just going to say that again.
One in three bites of food you eat is because of the work of pollinators.
That's incredible.
So if that's not effort enough to, like, the reason enough to want to, you know, protect
them, I don't know what it is.
But yep, so pollinators, they'll pollinate many plants like our fruits, our vegetables,
and our seeds.
A short list of crops that are pollinated by bees include apples, bananas, potatoes, coffee,
alfalfa, tequila, or agave.
And cranberries, which are really relevant to Wood County and here in Central Wisconsin.
Yeah.
We're not just speaking on the food that you eat, but the food that is produced by this
state.
There's so many of our ag in our farm industry, so much of the economy of this state is
built on.
Yep.
And then clean air pollinators help clean air.
So we said the 85% of flowering plants and 67% of agricultural crops rely on pollinators,
which means the more plants we have, the more clean air we have.
Not only that, these plants help purify our water, and they also provide us with clean
oxygen, which is really important.
And it just speaks to how amazing plants are and how amazing all of this process is and
everything.
All the different added jobs that they do along with all the other things that we were
touching on here.
And there is the economy end of this too, is that I was just touching on a little bit
there.
Yeah, this is some of these numbers are going to be pretty mind boggling.
So in the United States alone, pollination by honey bees contributed to over 19 billion
dollars of crop production in 2010.
I don't know, I couldn't find a, you know, current number on what that is, but 10 years,
you know, 2010, 19 billion dollars.
If it's anything close to that, you couldn't find a number because we're still counting it.
It's that big of a number.
It's that big of a number.
We haven't stopped.
Yeah, yeah.
Along with that, well, pollination by other insects, you know, besides bees, they've contributed
to nearly 10 billion dollars of crop production.
So pollinators alone in 2010 contributed a whopping 29 billion dollars to our economy.
I can't even wrap my mind around that is just incredible.
And I don't know about the, if the audience is doing this or not, but I know for me, when
we're talking about this stuff and you mentioned something like that right there, because of
the purpose of this conversation, one of the first thoughts I'm having is, well, what
if we didn't have them?
Yeah.
And just boom, like that, that thought of that 29 billion economics in this country gone,
just gone.
Along with, of course, other key factors here involving breathing and eating and some
other.
Yes.
Pretty simple stuff that you kind of need to be able to live.
Right.
I love that we're five minutes in and we already, I feel like we've already proven the importance
of pollinators.
Oh my God.
You have that.
You have.
But if, but we can keep going, because I think one of the cool things that we have an opportunity
to do here is to get people turned on to this and get people to realize, hey, this is,
this involves you too.
And long ago, my mother is a, as she likes to say, former hippie feminist, and it talks about
that a lot in those days and stuff.
Nowadays, I would hope that we're all activists, that we're all caring about our pollinators,
that we're all caring about our trees and our environment and everything.
There's nothing hippie-dippy about the future.
No.
There's nothing about caring about our lives and our kids having a future and those kind
of things.
No, caring about the natural world and what we live in in an ecosystem shouldn't label
you as anything.
You should just, you know, be stewards of the land.
That's what we're here for.
Now, when we're talking about all these things, I think that there is the common pollinators
we all know of.
But it also helps to get into that a little bit about who are the pollinators.
Yeah.
Like I said, when we started, you know, we think a lot about bees and butterflies.
There's a lot more pollinators than that.
And I think when we want to kind of list out what would be pollinators, we have to think
about how animals pollinate.
And then that will be kind of a key hint to who our pollinators are.
So a pollinator will visit the flower in search of food, generally nectar and pollen, and
during their time at the flower, the pollinator might brush against the flower's reproductive
parts.
And then unknowingly, they'll go to another flower and deposit the pollen.
So just-
They don't even really realize they're doing it.
No, no, no.
They're just part of what they do, how they're eating, right?
Talk about the happy accident.
Exactly.
That really is great.
Right.
So some examples of pollinators, like I said, we commonly think of butterflies and bees,
but there are many different kinds of pollinators, like birds, bats, ants, beetles, flies, moths,
wasps even, our pollinators.
Generally, animals or insects that can fly are the most efficient pollinators.
Now, you know, certainly, like you said, the big hitters here we've thought of before.
When I've even heard of flies and moths, those kind of things, but bats, I've never heard
of that before.
I just, when I got the notes from you, I look into it a little bit because I was so curious.
That's pretty cool.
I feel like we're learning more and more about bats as we're going along here and how important
they are.
They're not scaring anymore.
No, no, no.
They're just kind of a unique part of our culture, part of our life.
They're so underrated.
They are.
They're so underrated, but they're so important.
I think I have a little hint in here later on that I'll give you why bats are important.
It's funny.
I think the last time we talked, we talked about invasive species, a lot of conversations
since then.
I was talking about invasive species and somebody said, oh, bats are invasive.
I was like, no, bats are really, really key to a lot of our ecosystems, especially because
they're pollinators.
We invite you, bats.
Yeah.
You're not invasive at all.
We're welcoming you.
We're inviting you.
So besides the ones we've listed, bats, birds, beetles, et cetera, there are some really
unique pollinators in our world.
One example, I've got a couple here, but an example is on the island of Madagascar.
There are roughed lemurs, black and white rough lemurs, that are the main pollinators for
travelers trees and travelers palm, which is really interesting because they eat the
nectar of those trees so they're collecting the pollen on themselves and when they go
to tree to tree, et cetera, they're pollinating those trees.
There's a honey possum in Australia that pollinates the flowers from eucalyptus, which is really
cool.
Lizards, geckos and skinks can be pollinators, so there's some of our reptile species.
There's a couple in Brazil and then slugs and gnats can even pollinate.
So a really good example locally would be wild ginger.
There's been many times where slugs have been seen pollinating wild ginger.
Wow.
Wow.
Now, I don't want to get too into the weeds here, no pun intended.
When it comes to how these animals pollinate or how these insects pollinate or anything
like that, but I'm imagining that it is a little similar to the bee, they're brushing
into it and that kind of thing.
So much of this doesn't seem like a design necessarily.
Just kind of feels like this is the way that it was all attached and connected.
Whether it was intended or not for it to work this way or not, who knows, it's above
my pay grade, but it is so cool to kind of step back and see how all of this connects.
It's beautiful.
It really is.
And it just reminds us again and again how we are all connected, you know, and it's
always especially in a year and a time like this to remind people of how we are more connected
than ever.
What about how can you help pollinators?
Yeah.
And I really want to focus on this.
We talked about pollinators, hopefully got you kind of ramped up to think about pollinators
and being excited to protect them or get those gears turning.
So you can help protect pollinators whether you live in an urban or rural setting.
You know, one of the great things that you can do is you can conduct a habitat assessment
on your property.
It doesn't matter if it's a lot in town or you've got 600 acres out in the country, right?
There's really great assessments that you can do.
And these habitat assessments will be a great tool to identify practices where you can improve
or can even confirm practices that you've implemented right now.
So the Xercy Society, XERCES, Society has several different habitat assessment guides for
different types of landscapes and for specific insects.
If you really like butterflies, they've got a whole habitat assessment on how you can
improve your property for butterflies.
So they're all on their website and they're really easy to understand.
And it's like literally a checklist that you can go through, which is really cool.
My mom was curious about getting hummingbirds in her backyard and went to look into this
and everything.
It's a really user-friendly kind of site too.
Yeah, it is.
They do a really nice job covering all the bases too on something like this.
We're speaking with Anna Mitchell, Medicine Extension Wood County's Regional National Natural
Resources Educator, and I want to get into landscaping with us as far as how we can
help pollinators.
That's a big one as we're getting into our summer months here.
Yep, yep.
It is a big one.
So I had to limit myself on how much I wanted to suggest for landscaping because there's
so much you can do.
One of the things I want to stress though is plant native plants.
If you are going to landscape, just plant native plants because they're considered the best
choice because of their abundance of nectar and pollen for our local pollinators.
In addition to that, they're really low maintenance.
They're generally pest-free.
They're really drought tolerant, and they are great at controlling erosion.
So if you're living either way, I don't care where you're living, native plants are
good, but especially if you're living on any kind of surface water like a lake or a stream,
river, etc.
So when you plant those native plants, I wanted to give some examples so people would know
maybe what to look for.
So there's three categories that we're going to focus on.
So one is pollinator superfoods.
These are phenomenal food sources for our pollinator species in Wisconsin, and some of those
plants include milkweed, bee bomb, golden rod, and aster.
Those are just a couple.
Like I said, the Exerci Society has really good resources to dive into this a little bit
deeper, but those are just four species that we can start with, right?
Food for specialist bees.
So these are bees that are local, and they need like a specific plant in order to eat.
So some of those are lead plant, partridge pea, wild lilac, and dogwood.
So like I said, these plants provide food for our native bees or a specialist that only
collect pollen and other resources from these specific plants.
You know, when you do these things and you plant these, you're really going to see some
of the effects of this too.
That's kind of one of the cool things about this.
I've seen videos of people that do this before and after kind of stuff, and it's really
unique to see.
And it really adds to the life of their lawn, the life of their backyard if you will, or
anything.
I mean, the maintenance of it too drastically reduces.
Yep.
These plants sometimes, you know, native plants, you have to take effort to plant them.
But after that, they are really, really low maintenance.
And the beauty that you will see to your property is, I mean, if you're driving and you see
a prairie with it, it's just beautiful, beautiful blooms.
It's wonderful.
Like, much me being me would prefer that over some of our, you know, ornamental plants,
but that's just me.
And I do want to say something here, and this is just me speaking, but when it comes
to it, we're going to get into lawn and yard care a little bit more and everything.
And if you ask anybody, why do we mow our lawns?
Well, well, you don't know, do you?
We've always done it.
We've just always done that.
But there's no rhyme or reason to it other than like, like Anna said, there are aesthetics
in everything.
Code if you live in touch.
Sure, sure, sure.
But why we have that code and why we have these things.
And what is beautiful?
What is, you know, beautiful to one is not to another and everything.
We get that as far as people, lawns shouldn't be that different.
It shouldn't be that big of a leap to make that going forward.
It's not, it shouldn't be just may that we see these things.
It's just about aesthetics.
And to me, I'm with you, Anna.
I think that a lawn that is some healthy life to it and everything I drive past that.
I'm staring at that.
I see another lawn that's just mowed, eh, like a big deal.
I've seen that all the time.
I like seeing this.
I think it brings personality to your lawn, to your house, to your yard, to your
life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's funny, because so my husband and I rent right now, we don't own a home.
We're currently in the process of looking for one, thank you.
But we have lawn envies, what we say, we'll drive past people's houses.
It's like, you know, to each their own, but a yard that's beautiful and big and it's
just mowed.
And I hunter and I both look at it and we're like, the things that we could do, you know,
the plants, the, you know, we would just let it grow and to natives and be so beautiful.
And then the diversity you would see, you know, to take pride in providing back to our
ecosystem is really cool.
Yeah.
And that yard work that you guys are dreaming about, let's talk a little bit about that.
Let's get into some of that lawn and yard work.
Yes, for sure.
Yeah.
So there's a couple of things you can do if you have a lawn and, you know, you want to
care for pollinators.
So one easy thing is if you leave your leaf litter on site, you're providing habitat
for pollinators.
This is really important in the spring too when they're re-emerging.
They need that habitat.
There's not a lot out there right now.
So if you can just wait a little while to rake, that would be wonderful for pollinators.
And then, you know, you can use that leaf litter as mulch and other parts of your property
compost it.
You don't even have to compost it.
Just leave it as mulch.
It'll decompose and it'll put nutrients back into your flower beds, et cetera, garden.
You can reduce your mowing frequency and increase your mowing height.
And that'll allow some weeds to flower, which would be a food source, right?
We think of our dandelions.
What do you want, dandelions?
Mm-hmm.
They are a food source though.
They are food source for our pollinators.
Here's the bat thing.
You can install bat boxes.
Oh, I wanted to do this.
That's so cool.
You should.
They're really cool.
Like we said, bats are great pollinators, but they're also really, really, really great
pest control for unwanted bugs.
So some scientists have discovered that some bats, small bats species, excuse me, can
catch up to 1,000 or more small insects in a single hour.
That's impressive.
That's your mosquito.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the first thing I thought of.
If there's a mother bat who's nursing that's been proven that they can catch up to 4,000
small insects an hour.
That's incredible.
Just take it a moment.
That's incredible.
Provide those bat boxes.
If you have a water feature, like just a bird bath or any kind of water feature, put
some stones in it so that your pollinators, like your bees, your insects that pollinate,
they can land on that and drink without drowning.
Yeah.
That is such a simple way to help pollinators.
Oh, God, I feel like I should have thought of that years ago.
That's a great idea.
Oh, that's really good.
Just a small stone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So just also limit your use of pesticides.
So a healthy yard with the appropriate plant and species, especially natives and their
abundance, will bring pollinators in and then they will be your pest control.
You won't have to spend money on the pesticides.
If you're bringing in your native pollinators, a lot of them are carnivorous as well.
Like, well, I won't say carnivorous because not just me, but they will eat other insects.
And generally those are your pest insects that they're going to eat.
You're saving money while helping the environment.
I mean, boom, boom.
They're just win, win, win situations and as we're wrapping up here, just a couple of
minutes left, we want to encourage people to get involved on this and how they can.
Yeah, for sure.
So I did some digging.
I know May is right around the corner, right?
Tomorrow, actually.
Well, yeah, it's it's May anyway, it's it's May, um, no more May.
So in the city of Wisconsin, rapids, the common council adopted a resolution to designate
May of 2024 as no more May.
So the code for May, you won't get fined if you don't want your grass, you have to come
back into compliance after May.
Anyways, if you want to participate in no more May, you can actually stop at the mayor's
office on the third floor of city hall and get a free no more May sign for your your yard
as long as, you know, they have some left there.
But you know, each property owner that participates can stop and get a free sign.
And then you're you're you're voicing to your neighbors what you're doing, which is
cool.
And then you're getting others curious about it.
So not only that, we can create an advocate for habitat in our community hubs like our
library, schools, senior centers or any yet unused spaces like our sidewalk mediums.
If you have some kind of like pollinator system or you're improving habitat for pollinators
in your yard, put signage up so people know, especially if you're in town, there's a house
by me and they have signage up and we walk past that the other day and I was like, good
on you guys.
That's really cool.
And then host a tour, if you have like a really pollinator friendly yard, host a tour, invite
people over.
It's a great idea.
That's really good.
And there's always educating yourself as you wrap up with, I mean, that's an important
one.
You yourself can do so much homework and go down your own rabbit hole and discover so many
of these things that I've been able to thanks to people like Anna.
But more so, you can do, you know, it's great to have an Anna if you can, but you don't
need that.
You can do it yourself.
We've got these great supercomputers.
We walk around with every day and you can look up anything on it and any of the things
that we have talked about today encourage you to look into and find out more and research
a bit more.
And if people do have follow-up questions, want to know some more?
How can they get a hold of it?
Yeah.
You can stop into the extension office at the Wood County Courthouse or you can email me
at Annaanna.m.james, J-A-M-E-S, at whisk.edu.
Always a good time talking with you.
Thank you so much for the time and all you put into our community.
Anna, we'll talk again real soon.
Thanks, James.
We'll have more Midday Magazine for you coming up on WFHR, locally grown radio.
