Transcript
(soft music)
- When you're thinking
about enhancing pollinator
habitat on your forest,
it's really a good idea
to start with an inventory.
An inventory helps you understand
what you have on your property
and will help you prioritize
what activities you can do to make
that habitat better over time.
An inventory will help us identify
how much flowering habitat,
as well as how much nesting habitat
that the pollinators have available
to them on our property.
We also wanna look at how continuous
that habitat is, so bees are able to fly
from nesting to flowering
habitat without putting
out too much energy.
When you do your inventory,
things to be looking for are:
Whether you have a diversity
of different flower shapes
so that we can increase the diversity
of species that visit the property,
as well as increase the amount
of bloom time that the different flowers
on your property have.
We wanna make sure that flowers
are blooming as early as we can,
and then go and flower through the summer
and into the fall,
hopefully till October as best we can.
Having a diversity of flower shapes,
and nesting resources,
increases the diversity
of pollinators that visit the property
and will thrive on the landscape.
To do the inventory,
you'll wanna visit the different parts
of your property,
at varying times of the year.
Visit each part
of your property early
in the season, mid-summer
and then closer to the end
of the summer towards the fall,
in order to capture the flowering plants
at their varying bloom times.
You can go out to the different parts
of your property with
a clipboard, a camera,
and a field guide
in order to help you identify
the different flowers
that might be blooming on the property.
When you go out
to the different parts of your property,
try to focus on areas
that have large areas
of flowering plants.
Pollinators are attracted to a
what's called a plant signal,
or a flower signal,
where they're going to go
to a place where they
see a lot of opportunity
for nectar or pollen,
because it requires less energy
for them to move around,
to find new places to go.
So if you focus on those areas,
you can identify what
plants are flowering there,
what flower shape they have,
the color of the flower,
and then what species it is,
and what time of year they bloom.
It's also useful to identify
if the plants that you're looking
at are native or non-native.
Non-native plants are okay
and pollinators will often use them,
but sometimes if they're
non-native and invasive,
they can take over an area
and decrease the flowering resources,
and therefore, the pollinator species.
Native plants will help
increase the diversity
of species that we have on the property.
Identify large areas of flowering plants
and nesting resources on your maps
and include them in your management plan,
to help you manage for
future opportunities.
(soft music)
This video describes how to inventory bee habitat features on your forest/woodland property.
