Not all bees are created equal.
“When people think about saving the bees, they think honey bees,” says Jinny Toffelmire, Town of Okotoks environment and sustainability coordinator. “And honey bees are not native to North America at all and came over on the boats with all of the lovely Europeans a couple of hundred of years ago.”
In contrast, native bees have lived and evolved in this area for thousands of years and are incredibly efficient pollinators, she says.
“We want to make sure they’re healthy and we’re supporting them with everything we’re doing within our town limits,” Toffelmire says. “And education pieces are very important for people to get the right ideas as well as the right education about the pollinators around here.”
Okotoks was designated a Bee City in May 2021 in recognition of its ongoing work to protect pollinators – from bees to butterflies to ants.
Some of those measures include manual weed removal, alternate groundcovers and pest management that avoid herbicides, including steaming and torching.
Toffelmire says being part of the national Bee City program shows the Town is committed to making it a safe place for pollinators.
“Every year you participate in a Pollinator Week,” she says. “We launch ours every year, usually in the third week of July, and our conservation education program put a whole bunch of events together.
“And also part of that is doing something every year to protect pollinator habitat. Every year we try and plant, usually it’s garden spaces that didn’t exist before, with native plants that are really great for our native pollinator species.”
Native plants
Recent projects have included the planting of a pollinator garden in Waller Park last summer, resulting from a Native Plant Habitat Grant, offering free native seeds/plants, including nectar and pollen-producing trees.
Additionally, plantings have taken root outside the Operations Centre and Environment Education Centre along with a number of boulevards and medians in the community.
“There was a bunch of shrubs there, but we planted a whole bunch of native plantings, including some milkweed in trying to support any Monarch butterflies that might happen through here,” Toffelmire adds.
“And this year, we’re hoping for some grant money on this one, but hoping to plant more native plants around the Municipal Centre and the surrounding garden.”
Toffelmire says to support the pollinators means thinking long-term from early spring until the snow hits in the fall.
“And making sure that there are things blooming in our urban spaces particularly,” she says. “We’re trying to mimic nature, so we see crocuses at the beginning of the season and then at the end of the season see things like goldenrod and aster in the river valley and on the escarpment.
“It’s plants that are colourful, that will attract our butterflies and our native bees and with all of our gardens, just trying to make sure there’s always something blooming.”
One advantage to native plants is they’re accustomed to the wide-ranging climates and seasons that a southern Alberta calendar brings with it.
“They are much healthier and much better to withstand the different weather that comes up here,” she adds.
The Town doesn’t officially track how robust the biodiversity of the native bee population is, but does participate in some citizen projects. This year, there will be 10 bumble bee nest boxes put out in the river valley to then get a sense with how well they’re inhabited.
One little known fact is just how many native bees species pollinate in the area.
Over 300 native bees species in Alberta
“I was surprised when I first learned it as well, there’s over 300 native bees species in Alberta alone,” Toffelmire says. “And 30 of those are just bumble bees. You’ll see bumble bees out in the wild, and they’ll have different colours on their bums and those are indicative of the different types of species that are out there.
“The other 300 are ones you would see flying around and think they’re another type of fly.”
Alexandria Farmer, a professor at Mount Royal University and a biologist with the Alberta Native Bee Council, shared her expertise with the public during The Town of Okotoks’ Green Living Workshop in March.
Farmer says there are over 20,000 species worldwide, over 800 in Canada, with the latest research indicating there’s approximately 331 in Alberta.
It’s important to protect the pollinators because biodiversity equals resilience.
“We have seen, in general over time, a decline in the majority of our insect population,” Farmer says. “That, in itself, is actually really alarming when you think about the huge ecosystem function that not just our pollinators have within an ecosystem, but you think of insects turning over soil nutrients.”
Bees are designed to pollinate, she adds.
“In places where native bee diversity has declined, they’ve also documented with that a decline in the abundance of diversity of native forage or flowers,” she adds. “When you lose that diversity, you’re losing the diversity of other things within that ecosystem.
“It’s very important to maintain all of it and not just rely on the big winners.”
Threats to pollinators include habitat loss from altered landscapes, leading to foraging decline, degradation and urban sprawl, the spread of disease as well as pesticides and herbicides.
Native versus honey
Toffelmire says the Town loves sharing the knowledge on pollinators, particularly as an opportunity to clear up any misconceptions out there.
The Town does not allow urban beekeeping because studies have shown the honey bee often outcompetes the native bee for food in those urban settings, places where food isn’t in abundance to begin with.
Farmer’s presentation highlighted the impact of the competition for resources between honey and native bees with studies revealing 40 honey hives in a wildland habitat for three months will consume pollen that would have fed four million native bees. Additionally, the introduction of honey bees leads to a significant reduction of native bee population.
Native bees are often specialists, having evolved to go to a certain flower or shape, versus the generalist honey bee.
“It’s starting to be looked at as more of a farming practice,” Toffelmire says. “I love honey, as much as the next person, but you can look at honey, the same way you look at milk or beef, it needs to be managed by humans in order to come to be.
“We don’t often see honey beehives out in the wild and we’re not going to cultivate them out in the bush.”
Principally, it’s about giving the native bee population their best chance at survival.
“To do that, if you really want to keep bees, have a partnership with someone out in the county,” she says. “Talk to someone who’s a farmer, a rancher or who has an acreage, it’s a really cool thing to do, but we would prefer if it was not within town boundaries.”
What can we do?
There are steps the average citizen can take to create pollinator friendly environments at home.
They range from the simple to the counterintuitive.
“I was just thinking this when I saw one of my neighbours cleaning up all of the leaf litter in his garden,” Toffelmire says. “And I thought don’t do that, there is bee larvae in there.
“So leaving our yards in the spring as long as possible until it’s consistently over 10 degrees is the best thing that you can do.
“A lot of the native pollinators and all of the other beneficial insects that we have in our ecosystem, their eggs, their larvae, even queen bumble bees will winter over leaf litter in the backyard, in hollow stems of plants that have died in the fall.
“When we think we’re doing a good thing by cleaning up our gardens it’s actually quite detrimental to the native insect population.”
Additionally, residents are encouraged to plant flowers, especially native ones, which bloom from early-spring to late in the fall, and to avoid the use of herbicides.
“And again in the fall, you’re allowed to be lazy,” she says with a laugh. “You don’t have to rake up your leaves, if you want to just put them in a pile or throw them in your garden, you don’t have to cut anything down…The insects will thank you in the springtime.”
Farmer’s best practices include minimizing pesticides, leaving bare ground, ensuring access to well drained sandy soil and leaving dead branches for nesting, adding trees provide pollen and nectar for pollinators. Plants with pithy stems, trimmed at the top away from the nods, goldenrods and Black-Eyed Susans, are ideal habitats.
To create at-home nesting bee boxes, Farmer says raw cotton creates a substrate for native bees and to avoid the use of material that can be sticky such as wool. The boxes should also be six inches deep at minimum and can be cleaned out.
There’s information on the Alberta Native Bee Council website that gives enthusiasts a chance to plan a garden to attract specific native bee species.
More tips and information can be accessed at albertanativebeecouncil.ca and to find our more about Okotoks’ Bee City program, go to okotoks.ca/your-community/green-living.
