‘pollinators of native plants,’ with heather holm

BEES HAVE BEEN increasingly making the headlines–but often the conversation is specifically about honey bees, an imported European species that settlers brought over to help with pollination of agricultural crops, harnessing them like a farm animal, if you will.

Native bees species (like the mining bee above on the wildflower boneset) don’t get as much attention, and other insect pollinators even less, but without our wild pollinators we’d enjoy far less biodiversity, both in plants and animals—because they’re key to the food web, which would otherwise break down.

To get to know some of these unsung heroes and the critical roles they play, I spoke with Heather Holm, author of the book “Pollinators of Native Plants,” which teaches us how to identify and attract and appreciate them in our gardens and beyond. (Enter to win a copy at the very bottom of the page.)

Regular readers and listeners know that I love learning great words from science, and Heather writes that her book is about entomophily. Entomophily is very much like another word that I love: anemophily, which means wind-pollinated, but this one means insect-pollinated.

“It’s the relationship between insects and plants in particular, which I find absolutely fascinating,” says Heather, the principal of a native plant consulting and design firm in Minnesota and frequent lecturer and environmental educator. “As a horticulture person I’ve always been looking at plants. And then about 10 years ago I finally started to notice that it’s not just the plants that form the basis of our food web and ecosystem, it’s all this interaction that’s going on between the plants and insects.”

We talked about different kinds of bees, about bee-lookalikes, about powerhouse pollinator plants

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