Backyard gardens are building highways for native bees
University of Melbourne researchers found that planting native species in ordinary backyards helps rare native bees move between habitats across the city.
Native bees don't travel far to find food, usually foraging within about 100 metres of their nest. That means small, everyday spaces like backyard gardens can matter just as much as parks and reserves in keeping them fed and connected, according to researchers at the University of Melbourne.
Dr Katherine Horsfall, Dr Julian Brown and Professor Nick Williams found that when residents in the city's east planted locally native species instead of exotic ones, native bee diversity in those gardens increased, including sightings of the rare square-headed masked bee, Hylaeus quadriceps. Stringing enough of these native gardens together, street by street, can effectively create a corridor, or "highway," that lets bees move safely between larger green spaces.
The team built their picture of Melbourne's bee populations using more than 5,000 recorded bee-flower interactions, and point to citizen-science tools like iNaturalist as an easy way for home gardeners to spot and identify the native bees already visiting their own yards.
It's a hopeful, low-cost message for anyone with a patch of soil: the right handful of native plants can turn an ordinary backyard into a small but real piece of a city-wide lifeline for its bees.
This is a summary. Read the full story at the original source:
Read on Pursuit, University of Melbourne