Egremont — Pollinator advocacy is a good sport for the lazy; it often boils down to just doing less.
If you let the dandelions run riot in your yard this spring by not mowing as early as usual, you will provide pollinators with food they need before other flowers bloom.
Allowing a portion of your yard to go wild is also helpful.
So is not bothering to apply insecticides.
Letting those wild raspberry brambles get more overgrown is also recommended. According to a local beekeeper, much of our Berkshire honey starts in those prickly thickets.
Pollinator friendliness offers opportunities to expend energy as well. You can provide windbreaks, hedgerows and nesting areas, and promote plants that pollinators find tasty. If you don’t have direct responsibility for any land, you can volunteer to support a local public pollinator garden.
The list goes on and on. But how aware are we of all this?
On May 1, Egremont took an attention-getting step. We passed a pollinator-friendly resolution at our annual town meeting. The resolution was generated by the Agriculture Commission and garnered Green Committee support ahead of the vote. At the meeting, a local farmer stood up at the microphone to introduce it.
The resolution was based on a version that Great Barrington and Williamstown had already passed. It aims at promoting a thriving local food economy by discouraging the use of neonicotinoid insecticides. These are systemic chemicals, which means they affect the plant’s whole system. Because they are water soluble, they are absorbed into plant tissue and expressed in pollen, which is how they become so dangerous to pollinators.
State legislation to restrict the use of certain insecticides that are considered threatening to pollinators could be on the way. Such a bill would probably face pushback from growers and the chemical industry. But so far, these resolutions are nonbinding. Farmers and gardeners can still use whatever insecticides they like.
Nor do these resolutions affect anti-tick protocols, a concern that some voiced at the town meeting. People can still treat their lawns. The resolutions have no regulatory “teeth.” But they do ask that we commit to avoiding the use of insecticides on our property. Essentially, they encourage us to pause and consider a category of buzzing, stinging, winged, sometimes pesky and even scary, creatures whose biological importance is impossible to overstate.
The vast majority of our food crops depend on pollinators, as does the stability of our soil and our forests and our gardens. Even the Department of Defense says its military mission depends on them.
But these eco-superheroes face threats.
In 2017, the first U.S. bumblebee was listed as an endangered species. Bee blight is entering the business press because the loss of pollinators is hurting crop production and driving up food costs. Worrisome articles, ringing more alarm bells, are abundant online.
Our town resolution says the fight to save pollinators is on.
At a recent presentation at Egremont Town Hall, a local beekeeper told us that the spraying of nearby trees destroyed one of his hives. That meant about 45,000 bees were killed and he lost about $750. When the neighbor who was responsible for the spraying found out, he was very sorry. He’d had no idea that the chemical agent that his arborist was using could harm bees. He thought it was safe. And that’s the point: to learn more so we harm less.
We’d love to hear from you. The Egremont Green Committee can be reached at egremont.green@gmail.com.
