(inspiring music) >>Funding for Untamed is made possible by... (birds chirp) (water babbles) >>Many of us can remember back in elementary school.

When we learned about pollination.

The act of pollination is when the pollen travels from the male part of the flower or plant, the stamen, to the female part of the same flower, the stigma, or maybe to a nearby flower.

This may sound very simple, but the movement of pollen must take place for the plant to be fertilized and produce the fruit, seeds and next generation of young plants.

While some flowers like these beautiful tulips being grown here at the world-famous Bloommaker greenhouses in Waynesboro, Virginia, actually self-pollinate with the movement of the flower in the wind, most rely on insects or larger creatures to do that work for them.

Now, if you've ever taken a close look at a honey bee.

That fine yellow dust with which they're often covered, especially during the spring, is the pollen from the flowers they visit while they're collecting nectar.

When they visit the next flower, some of that pollen falls off, fertilizing the plants.

Now, if you stop and think about it, the reproduction of most organisms, including insects, fish, birds, and even mammals is really just a variation on pollination.

But most organisms don't need a third-party to get the job done.

But for plants, wild pollinators are essential.

Birds, butterflies bees, wasps, flies, moths, even bats are among the diversity of essential creatures that assure that plant life goes on and the ecosystem produces what it needs, especially fruits, nuts and seeds, that feed the entire community.

The population of pollinators is actually a key indicator of the health of the ecosystem.

These animals and insects are essential for creating and maintaining habitats on which many animals, including humans depend, and we rely on those habitats for food and shelter.

While pollinators are certainly responsible for creating and maintaining beautiful wildflowers throughout the world, it's also important to remember that they are responsible for much of the food we eat.

A third of the food we consume exists, because of the effort of pollinators.

Pollinators are not just an integral component of that natural world, they're part of our cultivated world as well.

When that natural world is disrupted and the population of pollinators declines, it's not just the scenic view that suffers.

We suffer as well.

Unfortunately, many pollinators are in decline and that decline is due to humans.

By destroying and fragmenting habitats and through the overuse of pesticides, we've made it very difficult for many species of pollinators to thrive.

Even if you never think about bees, bats, flies, or other pollinating species, you will be affected by their decline.

Our forest, meadows, gardens and even our dinner tables would look much different without the help of pollinators.

(lively music) >>My name is Amber.

I'm the Office Manager at the Wildlife Center of Virginia.

And when I'm not busy at the Wildlife Center, I am a beekeeper.

I got started in beekeeping a little over a year ago.

Once we moved here and set up our garden, I knew the next thing I wanted to try was beekeeping.

I reached out to one of the local beekeeping clubs and actually signed up for their introduction to beekeeping course.

And this 8-week course provided me with a lot of resources to get started.

Not only the materials, I would need, how to get bees, how to take care of them, but also things I could plant around my house that would help support these pollinators.

So after the course, the first step is to buy your bees.

So I reached out to a local bees supply and I drove down there and I picked up two nucs of bees.

So these are containers of bees that come with five frames already built out, and you have your queen and all of your bees ready to go.

You come back home and put 'em in one of your hive boxes.

My main goal in beekeeping was really to support the pollinators.

That's what drew me to beekeeping, but also honey's not a bad trade off in the end as well.

This hobby has been very rewarding, but it is a lot of work.

I would say, I devote about two hours every weekend just to maintaining my hives.

And that's opening each one up, looking through the frames, checking to make sure those bees are healthy, making sure the queen is laying her eggs and doing what she's supposed to do.

But overall, it's been a real joy and I really encourage other people to try it.

(lively music) >>I'm Jason Hallacher.

I'm the Vice President of the Shenandoah Valley Beekeepers Association.

In the most general sense, a pollinator is an animal that carries pollen from one plant to another to help fertilize those plants and allow those plants to produce seeds and create more plants over time.

And so, any animal that does that is considered a pollinator.

Pollinators need access to pollen and nectar throughout the growing season.

And so, you really wanna target native species of flowers, shrubs, and trees that bloom from spring all the way to fall.

And so, you wanna plant a diversity of species on your property and you need to learn about what these species are.

And one of the best resources you can look for is the Department of Conservation and Recreation's native plant list.

That'll tell you what plant is best for your area.

By increasing the plant diversity and bloom times on your property, you obviously will increase the pollinator diversity as well, because some species need resources in the spring, whereas others need it more in the fall.

And so, by having bloom times throughout the season, you can really increase the diversity of species on your property.

As far as butterflies, we see tiger swallowtails, monarchs, different types of buckeyes and skippers.

We see lots of different bee species like the American bumblebee, brown-belted bumblebee, commons, carpenter bees, even carpenter bees are pollinators.

And then, there's a huge array of wasps, flies and other types of insects, like beetles that they'll use these pollinator plants and are in fact pollinators.

The fascinating thing about early successional habitat like these wildflower meadows is it has a positive impact on pollinators, of course, but also it extends well beyond that.

The caterpillars that are feeding on some of the host plants in here are just a massive food supply for young songbirds.

They need that soft caterpillar to feed their babies.

The seeds that the flowers are producing right now, that's the fuel that these neo-tropical migrant songbirds need to make their long migrations.

They stop in these meadows as they move through to head south.

And then going even bigger, to some of the larger species like quail and turkey, they need these areas so that their young can move through easily, unlike some of the cool season grasses that you see that create that carpet.

Those young birds need to be able to move through there, and there's lots of little nooks and crannies in these meadows so that they can navigate that area.

Deer, bear, coyotes, they love the edge habitat, the deer bed down their fawns in this cover, the bear and the coyote hunt that edge habitat for food.

There's tons of berries in this habitat as well, that lots of species will use.

So it's really an all-encompassing habitat restoration that improves the habitat and lives of all types of wildlife.

Early successional habitat like this meadow needs to be disturbed to remain open.

Succession never stops.

And so, if we just left it alone, it would eventually become a young forest.

And then after years, it'd become an old growth forest.

And so, to reset succession, we use prescribed fire to manage our meadows.

These plants are fire adapted, so they love fire.

Fire is a very valuable tool.

It helps to reduce the amount of trees and shrubs that sprout in the meadow.

That'll eventually shade out some of these flowers.

It also improves germination rates and provides new areas for growth.

It trims out invasive species and returns nutrients to the soil.

So it's a very valuable tool.

Pesticides can be detrimental to wildlife if used improperly.

Definitely don't want to spray flowering plants, because the pollinators don't know that you've sprayed it and they will come to the plant and come in contact with that pesticide.

And that can be damaging to them.

If you do choose to use pesticides, especially to control for non-native invasive species, it's important to know what dosage to use, when, and how to apply it, and when the plant is most susceptible, so that you can avoid having a negative impact to wildlife.

I find so much joy in managing even these small pocket meadows on my property.

You don't need a lot of space to create good habitat for pollinators and other wildlife.

And you'll be amazed at the amount of life that comes to your property, even if you make a small little effort to plant native species in your yard.

Every little bit helps.

(upbeat music) >>My name is T'Ai Roulston.

I am the curator of the State Arboretum of Virginia, and I am also a research associate professor with the University of Virginia based in the Environmental Sciences Department.

So pollination itself, is simply the process of moving pollen, the male part of a flower to the stigma, the receptive surface of the female part of a flower.

And so, just the ways for gametes to move together.

And so, if we think about how an animals reproduce themselves, you have one animal moving toward another usually, but plants don't really have that option.

So in order to get the pollen from here to there, something has to go back and forth.

For some, it's wind, some, it's water, but for most, it's animals of some kind either insects or birds or bats.

So pollination is simply the movement of pollen from one flower to another flower.

If you ask somebody to name a bee, so people will say honey bees, and then, maybe they say bumble bees, but there are about 4,000 different kinds in the U.S.. We have 150 species that have identified right here on this property.

So in this one square mile property, there are 150 different bee species.

Now, if you think historically for North America, which has approximately 18,000 species of plants, most of which of our insect pollinated, most of them actually being bee pollinated, and they were all maintaining themselves before the European honey bee got here in the 1400s.

All bees are using pollen as they're protein source.

So they're out there looking for pollen they can collect and feed their offspring as a protein source.

And so, they need to collect that pollen.

So landscape management is really everything for where food is going to be found on the landscape for pollinators, as well as nesting substrates.

So if we think about the whole lifecycle of pollinators.

They're gonna over winter somewhere, so you have to have a variety of safe over-wintering places on the landscape.

And then, you have to have the flowers on the landscape.

And when are those flowers going to be there?

What kinds are gonna be there?

That all depends on landscape management.

So if you think about each kind of habitat that there could be, you have a seasonality for it.

So if it was forest, you just have flowers in the spring.

You'd have plenty of ground, plenty of nesting spotted above, but no flowers later.

If you had a big field like here, we have huge fields out here.

There's almost no flowers in the spring.

Pretty much zero.

Once late spring, very late spring, early summer comes into play, then you have all the flowers that are, lots of flowers out in the fields, and those flowers can go through different species all the way up until late fall.

So if you put the two together now, if you say we've got forest, we've got field.

Now you can cover a whole year with flowering opportunities.

So we have several declining species now in Virginia, that used to be very common.

So one, the rusty-patched bumblebee, which got put onto the endangered species list in 2017, used to be one of the most common bumblebees in the Eastern United States.

And its range has severely contracted.

And that is most likely from disease as well as some habitat changes.

Unfortunately, we don't really know what to do when it comes to disease.

We don't know how to cure disease in lots of wild pollinators out there, but what we can do is try to do our best with mitigating the risks of pesticide exposure, mitigating loss of habitat, and giving insects a chance to develop immunity to any diseases that do come up.

(upbeat music) >>Pollinators come in a variety of sizes and species.

Here in the United States and in most parts of the world, we're most familiar with our insect and bird pollinators, but in some parts of the world, other animals play an important role.

In many desert and tropical regions, it's a variety of bat species that play the critical role in pollination, especially with night-blooming flowers.

And while the pollinating bats may not be active in our own region, their activity where they are found affects us right here at home.

(upbeat music) >>My name is Leslie Sturges and I'm the President of Bat Conservation and Rescue of Virginia.

And we do rescue and rehabilitation and conservation advice for native Virginia bats.

In order to be an effective pollinator, you and your flowers have to exist together and for bats, because there a larger vertebra, they need access to nutrition on a more reliable basis.

So you're gonna find them in tropical areas where there's constant flowering and also surprisingly, in desert areas.

Pollination biology, I think, is one of the most fascinating things just going on in nature.

So for any animal that pollinates, the flower has to fit the pollinator.

And I know it's kind of hard for people to wrap their heads around, because this organism that's literally rooted to the ground, it has to figure out how to get its sexual material from one flower to another entire plant, not just another flower, because you need that genetic crossing.

So to attract something like a bat, that's larger and doesn't always hover well, these plants have done this amazing engineering.

So if you're looking at a bat tree, that's pollinated by bats like baobab, those flowers are large and they're on the outside of the tree's profile, so the bat can come in and either hover or for other types like bottle brushes in Australia, the bat can literally land on the stem and then, get it face in there and work out the nectar.

Well, in so doing, it's getting covered in pollen.

And if you're talking about North America, between Mexico and the United States, we have these barrel cactus communities.

Well, if you look at the shape of those flowers, they are designed for a bat to be able to fit into, get the nectar from the bottom and then come out and be literally just dusted in pollen.

So then, it goes to the next flower and leaves some pollen behind.

So agave, it's a cactus, and it is associated with our United States desert Southwest and down into Mexico.

And it flowers on a tall spike.

That is a bat-shaped flower.

It blooms at night, it is strongly scented so they can find it.

And historically, the bats that are what we call obligate pollinators, that they have to use agave nectar in order to survive.

And the agaves have to use those bats in order to get pollinated.

So this is a really tight relationship.

So the bats migrate up, like I'm more familiar with the Baja Peninsular story, but they migrate up and end up in some caves where they have their pups.

And in order to do that, they need that nectar fuel to get there.

So they follow the bloom of the agave as it moves northward, and then they migrate back down.

Right now, there are huge development pressures throughout all of South America, Africa, even Australia has mining pressures.

So there's not a specific disease you can point to like for our insectivores and white-nose syndrome, that's sort of a really nice, neat little relationship.

But when it comes to pollinators, it is loss of forest, loss of the plants that sustain them.

So when you think about pollination and the foods we eat, it is said that one of every three bites of food you take, you owe to a pollinator, which means that those pollinators and those plants that we eat, and we eat a lot of plants.

We may not think about all the different plants that are in our food, but it's a lot of plant-based diet out there.

So when you're purchasing any food that a pollinator helped with, I think you wanna think about where did that food originate?

Who made it, who farmed it?

I think you really need to put some thought into your selections and to start thinking about, is this company or producer or grower doing right by the land and by the pollinators that exist there.

(uptempo classical music) >>I am Stacey Molds, and I work for the Virginia Department of Transportation.

And I'm the pollinator habitat coordinator for VDOT.

The VDOT pollinator habitat programs, is an initiative with where we create natural areas that protect and provide habitat for pollinators.

And we create these gardens at safety rest areas, park and rides, and other VDOT facilities, where the public can safely stop and see these gardens and learn about the importance of pollinators.

And we started our program in 2014, partly in response to the White House strategy for pollinators.

And we started with just four projects in the Northern Virginia area, 900 square foot pollinator gardens.

And we used pollinator-friendly plants, and since that time, we now have 25 projects at rest areas and park and rides.

In addition to providing a pollinator habitat, these gardens are really valuable for the environment.

The plants that we put in here are native plants, meaning that they're native to the area, so they're gonna have deeper tap roots, which are important for them to be able to survive in times of drought, they don't need as much water.

They also don't need fertilizers, because they're adapted to the soils that are here and with their tap roots, they also, they open up the soil's pores, so they allow more rain.

When it rains, the water that falls on the ground is absorbed in the soil there, and it's not running off.

So it's not creating storm water runoff.

And also, the deep tap roots and the plants absorb the carbon from the atmosphere.

So they're cleaning the air.

They also are provide environmental benefit.

They're aesthetically beautiful.

There's a lot of diversity.

There's things blooming, there's grasses swaying in the breezes.

And then, they provide mental health benefits, especially at places like these, like rest areas where people the traveling public is driving under stressful conditions.

It's can be a good place to stop and be with nature easily and safely.

We usually put these gardens in areas of existing grass or turf.

And so, to do that, we need to kill the grass.

We typically, have done that by using just a non-selective herbicide that is removed quickly in the soil.

And then, we till the ground, we'll usually add a few inches of mulch, which will help protect the ground from weed growth and protect the plants, when they're newly established from moisture, then we plant the plants, usually use plants or plugs as opposed to seeds, 'cause we want the plants, the gardens to get established quicker.

We leave everything standing throughout the winter, and then in the early spring or late winter, we cut back the herbaceous growth to about six inches.

And then, we might do a light coating of mulch for the gardens that are less established.

And then, we typically in areas such as this that are more publicly visible, we weed them every 6 to 8 weeks, and areas that are kind of more back of the way, less visible, we do a little bit less maintenance.

I think with increasing development, we really need to be strategic with how we use our spaces.

And in addition to making sure that our places have areas for humans, we need to always include as much as possible spaces for wildlife.

And VDOT is doing this in a lot of other ways.

We revised our mowing practices.

So along our interstates especially which are wider, we are only mowing the areas that we need to regularly.

And then, the areas beyond that, we are just mowing once a year.

So those areas can be wild areas, provide habitat for pollinators and other animals.

In terms of our safety rest areas, we have 42 rest areas.

Way stations are our kind of pull off areas on our smaller roads, such as secondary roads.

And those have been around since really, since roads have existed.

But with the development of our interstates, back in the sixties, we started building these rest areas.

We also have a lot of park and rides.

We have over 150 that are owned by VDOT and many more that we partnered with the localities.

So really, there's an almost endless opportunity for us to put these pollinator gardens in.

(gentle piano music) >>Pollinators are found everywhere there are flowering plants, or at least they're supposed to be, there are many things that you can do that will assure pollinators find a welcoming habitat, right in your own backyard.

First, select native flowers and plants for your yard and garden.

Plants and their pollinators have often evolved together over millions of years.

Many flowering plants have very specialized pollinators that exist right alongside them.

Find local nurseries that specialize in plants from your area, because native plants are easier to maintain and they fit in with your local ecosystem.

The second thing you can do is leave your lawn, maybe a little bit taller and a little less manicured.

The additional plant cover provides cover for pollinators and a richer biodiversity.

That is essential to your specific yard and to the ecosystem in which you live, including area farms.

You can provide nesting habitat for a variety of pollinators, including birds and insects, simply by leaving a portion of your yard undisturbed, let it grow wild.

Different species have different requirements.

Just as many people feed the birds, some folks actually enjoy feeding insects and other pollinators, a simple shallow dish of sugar water will attract all sorts of interesting creatures.

Certainly the most important thing we can do is to reduce or eliminate our use of pesticides around our homes.

If you must use pesticides to address a particular problem, choose a product and an application method that treats the specific pest you want to remove, avoid the overuse of broad spectrum pesticides that result in scorched earth pest control.

While you may not want ants on your doorstep, don't kill everything in your yard to achieve that one specific goal.

Pollinators enable the earth and the plants that grow upon it to feed us and nourish us.

They provide the materials we need to sustain our agriculture and our economy and they make the world around us a beautiful place in which to live.

But it's up to us to take care of them.

>>Funding for untamed is made possible by... (birds chirp) (water babbles) (inspiring music) (icon chimes)