Author: Carole Christian

Encouraging Pollinators without costing production
Practical Guide

Insects provide key pollination services with 75% of the world’s leading crops benefitting. These crops include nutritionally rich crops such as legumes, nuts and fruits which provide essential proteins, lipids and vitamins. Pollinators are vital in securing future nutritional demands and human wellbeing and through pollinating wild flowers they help sustain a range of habitats.
Despite their importance, and a concerted effort to conserve them, pollinators continue to decline. In particular, they struggle in intensively managed landscapes where they face a range of pressures, including the loss of flower-rich habitats, climate change, and pesticides. This factsheet provides key actions you can take to support pollinators in grassland systems whilst maintaining productivity.

This Practical Guide provides guidance on how beef and sheep farmers can enhance pollinators without impacting production.

Insect pollinators and flowering plants

While bees are the most widely recognised pollinators, a wide diversity of insects visit flowering plants in the UK including beetles, wasps and flies. The value of these unsung heroes is becoming increasingly recognised.
Insect and flowering plants show a strong interdependence. Flowering plants rely on insect pollination for reproduction and the maintenance of genetic diversity, while in return flowers provide sugar-rich nectar and protein-rich pollen. The success of pollination and accessibility of these floral rewards, however, depends on both flower and insect traits. Deep legumes such as field beans, are primarily visited by long-tongued species such as the garden bumblebee whereas the more open flowers of apples are widely accessible and visited by a range of bees, beetles, flies and wasps.
With different insect species responding to environmental change in different ways, maintaining a diverse assemblage of pollinators helps to ensure pollination services are resilient to our changing climate. Furthermore, managing habitats to support insect pollinators, will also support a variety of other wildlife.
Visit the Insect Pollinators & Pollination section of the Farm Advisory Service website to learn more about how to monitor, and support pollinators on your farm.

This practical guide is funded through the Scottish Funding Council University Innovation Fund as part of The Graze Debate theme; bringing together beef and sheep farmers striving to understand the best way forward for the business, society and our planet.

Encouraging Pollinators without costing production

What pollinators need and how to provide these resources

A variety of flower-rich habitats provides a constant supply of forage which in turn supports a diversity of pollinators throughout the season. Staggering the trimming of hedgerows ensures some areas flower each year and including a mixture of honeysuckle, hawthorn, dog rose and holly will extend flowering. Wetlands and road verges provide late season forage helping support breeding bumblebees. Promoting infield resources for example through deferred grazing, multispecies swards, and including legumes such as clover, will further benefit pollinators.
Hedgerows, woodland edges and undisturbed areas provide both habitats for nesting bumblebees, and shelter/overwintering sites for a range of pollinators including bumblebees, hoverflies and butterflies. Many hoverfly larvae benefit from damp decaying vegetation found in wetlands, buffer strips and woodlands while diverse grass swards will provide larval food for grassland specialist butterflies including the small heath, meadow brown and large skipper.

Species rich
grassland
Bumblebee on
crimson clover

Positive actions
Promote flowers in fields, and marginal habitats
Stagger cutting of hedgerows to enable flowering each year
Leave undisturbed areas to provide shelter, overwintering and nesting sites
Protect species-rich grasslands
Complete an Integrated Pest Management plan
Try and avoid
Late season mowing of roadside verges
Use of fungicides, herbicides and insecticides
Ryegrass dominated pastures

Key actions

1) Assess: As a general rule where you see flowers, pollinators will find food. Consider where the flowers are on your farm and determine if there are periods during the pollinator activity period (March-September) when flowers are lacking. Once you have identified these clinch points you can explore options on how to fill these gaps. Remember many pollinators (e.g. bumblebees, honeybees and hoverflies) will travel over a kilometres to find food so planting species such as lavender or crocuses in the garden, steading or farm tracks can help.
2. Protect rare habitats: Species-rich grasslands are particularly valuable for pollinators and the last century saw a loss of 97% of these habitats. The characteristic plant assemblages support a range of our rarer pollinators including the northern brown argus butterfly, Northern Colletes mining bee and blaeberry bumblebee.
3. Seek win wins: Some management actions not only support pollinators, but can also increase the resilience of farms to climate change. Hedgerows and shelterbelts provide livestock shade and shelter whilst providing shelter and early season forage for pollinating insects. With different plant species responding to environmental extremes in different ways multi-species swards not only provide food for pollinators but can help stabilise yields during climate extremes. Carefully considered management actions can benefit pollinators and production.

How Scotland aims to protect our pollinators!
https://www.nature.scot/