Where to Listen:
If you care about the environment, it can sometimes feel overwhelming. From microplastics to PFAS to climate change, the world’s problems can seem almost impossible to solve. But what if you could make a difference in the fight to protect our environment by doing nothing at all? In this episode, why fall is the perfect time to be lazy… for the planet.
Host:
Amy Barrilleaux
Guest:
Elizabeth Braat, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
Resources for You:
Episode 43: The hidden pesticides that could be lurking in your pollinator garden
Neonic Pesticides and their Impact
Transcript:
Amy Hi there and welcome to the Defender, Wisconsin’s environmental podcast. The Defender is powered by Clean Wisconsin, your environmental voice since 1970.
If you care about the environment, it can sometimes feel overwhelming. From microplastics to PFAS to climate change, the world’s problems can seem almost impossible to solve. But what if I told you you can make a difference, a real difference, in the fight to protect our planet by doing nothing. In this episode, why fall is the perfect time to be lazy for the planet. That’s right now on The Defenders. It’s fall and if you have a yard, that means you probably have some raking to do, but next time you step outside and feel the stress of another chore, just walk back inside, close the door, make some tea, and don’t worry about it. That’s because the simple act of not raking does wonders to protect all kinds of important insects, including native pollinators, which have been in dramatic decline. I recently met Elizabeth Braatz from the Department of Natural Resources Bumble Bee in my own backyard. To learn about the delicate ecosystems that are living under our leaves.
Elizabeth Oh, it’s good to see you!
Amy Nice to see YOU! Thank you for coming out.
Elizabeth Oh, of course!
Amy So, you can see that we have not raked. Even if we had raked into a big pile, it’s been so windy. It’s blowing all down the street!
Elizabeth Oh my gosh, the stems, all the stems are out, I like it!
Amy When I see people devoting like hours and hours of their weekend days piling up leaves in a pile and then they get… Then the city comes with its like trucks and hauls everything off to a place. I do think they compost the leaves in Madison. It makes me feel like, why are we doing this? So tell me from a pollinator perspective, I guess we’ll just go look at different, you mentioned the sticks that you were happy to see.
Elizabeth I was, I was.
Amy Yeah. So let’s, I’m guess look around and see why sticks are good or whatever.
Elizabeth Absolutely. Yeah, we’ll go on a little pollinator walk. And it’s amazing that this whole world you can do in a couple feet. So we’re standing at the edge of the driveway and there is a beautiful little garden, there’s a tiny fence around it, but then you can also see the leaves and the little plants poking out through it. There’s a tree here as well. And underneath the tree, as is very natural, is all sorts of leaves. And they’ve kind of just collected to create a natural mulch around this garden. And I’m… I actually think it looks really nice. I think that we need to update sometimes our perception of what is a neat garden, what is a beautiful natural garden.
Amy So when you say a beautiful, natural garden, I mean what we’re looking at is a huge pile of leaves all over this garden bed that had some pollinator-friendly, or has some pollinator-friendly perennials in it, and along with some other things as well, that are all just, you know, now looking kind of done for the fall.
Elizabeth It’s gonna be yellow, it’s gonna reds and golds and those colors and oh I see a little bit of a milkweed plant as well. The puff is going out to create more milkweed. But what I like to see about here also is leaves. You can almost think of it’s like a natural free mulch that your trees want to keep giving the ground because this is what- these ecosystems have evolved over time to do naturally. And it kind of acts as an insulating layer as well for so many different species of beautiful butterflies and bumblebees and other great beneficial insects to hide in over the winter. Although we often think of butterflies and bumblebees as oh, these are kind of summer animals. We see them during the spring and the summer and then they kind of just disappear magically over the winter, but they still need habitat during that time. They aren’t really disappeared. They’re hiding. So, for example, bumble bees hide under leaf litter and other ground cover during the winter. So most of the colony for a bumblebee will die. But the new queens only will survive, or they’re also called gynes, kind of like a princess, because they don’t have a colony yet, and they’ll burrow under these leaves, and then in the spring, the world wakes back up again, and all these bumblebee queens will kind of sometimes emerge out of this leaf litter and start their new colonies and start pollinating again. And so it’s really helpful for them to have this insulation, and they really depend on it. Similarly a lot of looking at the Oh, was this an allium or some kind of…
Amy Yeah, it’s a nodding onion.
Elizabeth Oh, nice! Oh, so cool. So what we’re looking at here are these little nodding onions and there’s all sorts of other plants around here as well where they’ve been left untrimmed and actually it’s kind of pretty, the flower heads of these as well. But… Solitary bees will also have a life cycle that depends on having some habitat over the winter, even though we aren’t seeing them. So solitary bees, just to clarify, are a group of pollinators that are very common in Wisconsin. We have over 400 species of, well, solitary to aggregating species of very, very tiny bees. Oftentimes people don’t even notice them, but they actually pollinate quite a lot. They’re doing a lot of free pollinating for us to create fruits and vegetables and flowering plants and all those other good things. And a lot them will nest either in little patches of bare ground or in stems. So about 70% of them are going to go into the ground, about 30% of them are in some kind of cavity, such as hollow stems. And what they do, it’s so clever, they will. Well, it’s clever if the stems are left standing, and if the stems all disappear over the winter, then summer is not such a good strategy. But they will be active during the summer. And then the females will get a collection of pollen and nectar that we call bee bread. And they’ll make a little ball of that, and they’ll go into a hollow stem or a pithy stem. And they leave that little piece of food for their baby. They lay a little egg on top of it. And then they’ll seal off that chamber with, some of them will use bits of leaves, some of the will use kind of secretions, and then, they go and find some more pollen and nectar, and they make another bee bed, and they put that in the next compartment right above the last one, then seal that off. So it’s kind of like these stems are an entire little hotel full of baby bees. And then, the queen, the, not really a queen, but the female, will die at the end of the season. So that’s why we don’t see many adult small bees around in the winter. But they still need habitat over the winter, it’s just their babies. And those babies are gonna be in those hollow stems.
Amy So I think when you think about plant care, a lot of people come in the fall and they just kind of chop down their big dead stems, but we shouldn’t chop down our dead stems.
Elizabeth Correct, yeah. From a pollinator perspective, they need a lot of those stems and some overwintering habitat. They need the leaves. Leave the leaves, save the stems. They’re all part of a very natural habitat and cycle that’s been going on for a very long time that is really dependent on all these components still being there.
Amy I think when we think about pollinators, you’re right, we see them in the summer, so we think of them in the air, up high. So I think if you would have asked me a couple years ago, hey, where do bumblebees live over the winter? I’d be like, well maybe in a tree or somewhere high up, but really there could be bumble bees living right now underneath all of these leaves and everything that we’re looking at.
Elizabeth Yeah, and fun fact, the only found queen rusty patched bumblebee, which are federally endangered bumblebees, and Wisconsin actually has quite a lot of rusty patched bumble bees, so it’s very exciting that we live in a state that still has this animal. The only time we have found an overwintering queen of that species was here at the arboretum, the UW Arboretum. Someone was doing a survey for jumping worms, of all things, and surprise, they hit the jackpot and they found this beautiful, sleepy… great big bumblebee that they realized wait a minute this looks really special this looks different so they sent in the pictures and they got it verified that it was a queen rusty patched bumble bee so you never know what buried treasures are under your lawn.
Amy I think sometimes people might see this yard as, hey, they need to rake, which may be true. But what does raking do then if there are potentially pollinators living under there?
Elizabeth Yeah, good question. Well, in some cases the raking will just directly move the animals, and sometimes it can just directly remove the animals. Some butterflies will lay eggs on the ground for lack of butter or debris, the ground wealth on the grounds, and then if it gets raked up they’re going to have a hard time completing their life cycle. Other times it just removes the habitat that’s kind of keeping them insulated and protected. There was actually a really neat study. That was done not too long ago, within the last five years, where some researchers in the Northeastern part of the country were doing this kind of transect study where they had all of these lawns. It was really great. They got these homeowners to participate and they put transects, which are like a little box of the same size, out on lawns and they compared lawns that were raking and removing the leaves versus ones that didn’t and they were finding huge increases in. The bees and especially actually the Lepidoptera, so the butterflies and the moths, for the lawns that kept the leaves. So it’s just providing a lot of habitat. If you ever have seen wooly bear caterpillars, they are very cute. They look like it’s black and then kind of reddish and then black again. And they’re about the size of a finger and it’s so fluffy. And so if you ever see it going along a bike path or a trail, sometimes you see this fat little caterpillar hastily going across. That’s a rolly bear and they rely on leaf litter and other debris on the ground to kind of stay warm and to be able to survive the winter. Luna moths as well, if you’ve ever seen these beautiful, big, huge moths that are bright green, they also will use debris in overwintering habitat. So it’s really quite valuable for them and it doesn’t also have to be all or nothing. Uh, for example, the garden that we’re standing in front of, it’s got a little tiny fence and so a lot of the leaves are kind of collecting along here as well. And we also, well, we also see leaves throughout the front yard and I see nothing wrong with that. I think that’s really great. Uh, funnily enough, I don’t know whether your neighbors are raking or not, but with the wind, uh, the leaves kind of just everywhere also. So you can save a decent amount of time too, and of course it will depend on your neighborhood. I’ve also heard of people raking up parts of the front yard or parts of the stuff in between the road and the sidewalk but then leaving their backyard or raking some parts and then keeping it around the garden as a mulch. So there’s a lot of different uses that you can find for these leaves.
Amy Well let’s go ahead and walk to the backyard where I think you’ll see you’ll see more leaves. But I wanted to ask as we’re walking, how damaging has our attachment to green bear lawns been to pollinators over the last I don’t 75 years?
Elizabeth Oh it’s it’s pretty bad for them. This is kind of almost like an ecological desert if you compare it to the prairies or the gardens that could be hosting. It’s kind of like we have hundreds of native species and beautiful beneficial insects and butterflies and lady beetles and moths and bumblebees and none of those really can use grass very well, you’re kind of replacing a whole ecosystem with a monoculture, often of species that aren’t even, well depending on the location or which mix you’re using, may not even be native to that particular local area. And you’re losing a lot of the diversity and habitat for those species. So not saying that we can’t have grass, I know that people will play soccer and they’ll play all sorts of things on. Lawns, but having sections, for example, I’m seeing in this backyard along the edges there’s trees, there’s little bushes, there are leaves again, there’re little piles of brush for things to live in, there is a little garden. We can intersperse that with a mix of things that can also be really nice for people to grow up and see nature and see other living things as well. Uh, because it’s very, it can, it feel very sterile otherwise.
Amy When you talk to people about leaves you know and tell them hey there’s a whole ecosystem underneath these leaves I mean what’s their reaction because we don’t normally think of anything being kind of under the leaves.
Elizabeth Yeah and one of the Bumble Bee Brigade volunteers, and she’s a member of the UW Arboretum Board Judy Cardin. The way she describes it, she likes to have people meet the bees. And so oftentimes it’s kind of a shared wonder. I’ll try to find, it’s a little harder in the winter, but I’ll find a bee or a butterfly or something that we can go and see and enjoy right there. And then we start with that, like look at this amazing creature and we’ll share some fun facts. We’ll learn more about what they like, what they grew up with, the animals that care about. Oftentimes people will have attachments to butterflies, they’ll associate them with family or with some parts of their culture and so on. And then I’ll say, did you know that it follows this life cycle? And then as we start connecting this animal that we can see in front of us, whether it’s a fat little bumble bee pollinating their favorite flower or a butterfly that reminds them of their mother, we can go back into then talking about the whole life cycle of these creatures. And as we connect those different parts of the lifecycle, which do include parts in the winter time, then people can start seeing the value of this habitat for these other animals that they also value.
Amy So when you look around, let’s go over to this, this is what I would call like the more junky part of the yard where we keep random sticks and leaves where we don’t know what else to do with them. How many, you call them animals or creatures or insects, do you think are kind of living in this small area of stick and leaves and small trees.
Elizabeth To all those little animals and critters, this is a bonanza. This is the party spot. So they’re very happy about it, I’m sure. Good question. You know what? I don’t know. Easily in the hundreds, though. And some of them you’d almost have to see with a microscope, because looking at even soil organisms and so on, it’s incredible. As long as you are letting these nutrients go back into this soil and cycle back, it is living. There’s hundreds of little animals. So. In terms of the ones that we could see with our own eyes right now, I’m not sure.
Amy But you think maybe some bees and butterflies could be in here?
Elizabeth Yeah, we can have bees, we could have butterflies, we could have little decomposing critters that are really helpful for cycling nutrients. We could have moths. We could beetles. We could different species that sometimes when you have gardens, you’ll have herbivorous animals and herbivores insects that seem like such a pain. But they do have all these natural predators as well. So you could have the whole cycle in here. Yeah, it could be. It could be a whole little ecosystem in a couple feet of backyard.
Amy What happens if you know we do sort of the traditional lawn maintenance where we we rake all these leaves out we take out all this brush that’s just kind of hanging out we pull out our dead perennials and dead annuals and everything what happens to all those butterflies and bees and you know little mini bees and all those little organisms that we’re talking about?
Elizabeth Yes I might have to steal that. Mini Bees! That’s actually a really good description of them. Well, in the same way that we need our homes and habitat in the winter, they also need that. And so, a lot of them just can’t make it if they don’t have the habitat that sustains them. And maybe we don’t see that loss in the winter, but we see it later in the spring and the summer. Like, huh, there’s just not as much things flying around as I thought. Or, huh I wonder where they went, or I wonder where that wen? and… And remove enough base organisms in the ecosystem and eventually you can start seeing effects in how well the ecosystem as a whole functions.
Amy When you look back at the last 50 years, we went through a pretty rough pollinator decline, I would say. What has been happening from your perspective in terms of pollinators in Wisconsin? I know we started to realize that they were declining for a whole host of reasons. Where do we, what has been happened and where are we now in your estimation?
Elizabeth Yeah, great question. Let’s see. I can’t give exact numbers, but I can give a general overview. So in the past 50 years or so, or actually longer than that, we have seen very, very large pollinator declines, both across bumblebees as well as all sorts of native bees and butterflies. Of the 20 species in Wisconsin of bumble bees, we have seven species of greatest conservation need, which means that they’re declining in the state, as well one federally endangered species and three species, a few of which probably aren’t actually in the state anymore, that we think they’re probably extirpated, that our state species of greatest conservation need, which means that, oh sorry, state species of greatest information need, so many acronyms, and that means that we have so little information about them we can’t even rank them. So, that’s what, over half of the bumblebees, that’s not a great ratio. And it’s been driven by a lot of, a kind of combination of factors. So habitat loss is a really big one as we are converting places to urban areas as well as intensified agriculture. A lot of the, and this goes into a second cause of decline, is pesticides and herbicides and all the “cides” are pretty damaging to a lot insects. And so a lot of the margins of agricultural lands have become increasingly intensely managed as well. They’ve gotten a lot of pesticides put onto them, which our pollinators just can’t quite survive. And so we have habitat, we have pesticides, disease spreads, especially sometimes managed bumblebees and honeybees will sometimes spread diseases to wild populations, and so keeping those healthy is really important. And being careful about how widely we spread them. And then, we have climate change as well. So as the climate is changing and we’re getting, I think I heard someone describe the other day, it’s like, what is a usual summer anymore? So we’re sometimes getting droughts, sometimes we’re get excessive rains, we’re these warmer winters. All these animals that have evolved for millennia for a very kind of specific cycle, they’re starting to get a little disruptive and disrupted. All of those by themselves aren’t necessarily enough to get to take down a healthy population but then when you have stressor after stressor and it’s just stacking on top of each other it’s a lot for the little bees.
Amy So when we look at a yard like this or any yard, how important is it that we kind of take pollinators into consideration when we’re making decisions here in the fall about whether to leaf blow or rake or take down stems or any of those things when we think about all of the stressors that our pollinators are under?
Elizabeth Yeah, absolutely. So important. I think it’s so important and valuable because it’s something we can do. One thing that I really love about pollinators as well is that they’re a type of animal that you can see in your own neighborhood, your own apartment complex area, your own backyard, your suburb, and there’s something that we can do about right here. They’re small, they have pretty fast life cycles, which is in some ways actually very satisfying because you can put in habitat and then the next year you can see them using it and be like, wow, I made a difference. And we are seeing, so I will say, Wisconsin is one of the best places in the world now for rusty patched bumblebees, which are endangered. And so for whatever reason, whether it was parts of our natural topography or landscape, maybe it was part of being close to the Great Lakes, but we happened to hold on to some populations of them, and we’re hearing these wonderful stories about people doing things in their own backyards and neighborhoods to help them. For example, there was a school that the teacher did something so creative. He incorporated some of Wisconsin’s own endangered species and wildlife into their curriculum when they were learning about ecology and biology. And the kids were so inspired, they said, wait, we know what a bumblebee looks like. We’ve seen them. And so they made a whole little presentation. They did it in front of the supervisor, asking for a little pollinator patch to be put in the kind of lawn, the grass monoculture lawn of their school. The school approved, and now it’s this kind of living, learning laboratory that students from all the grades of that school are now using as part of their classroom. And they sent in… A photo of a rusty patched bumble bee a couple of years ago at their habitat. So you can make a difference and especially as, I don’t know, there’s so many things that we can’t control but backyard habitat and our own neighborhoods are something that we do have more control over and it can make a difference.
Amy Well thank you once again for coming out here and educating us about pollinators and where they’re going to be spending their winter hopefully right alongside us in our yards.
Elizabeth Thank you so much, Amy. Thanks for having me. This is a beautiful spot
Amy And thank you for listening to The Defender. To learn more about the volunteer Bumble Bee Brigade and how you can help protect Wisconsin’s pollinators, check out the show notes or log on to CleanWisconsin.org. And if you have something you want me to talk about or just a comment on the show, send me an email, podcast@Wisconsin.org, and remember to leave a review on your favorite streaming app. It helps other people find us. I’m Amy Barrilleaux. Talk to you later.
