 Pollinator gardens provide a beautiful, sustainable, and a nourishing habitat for bees and butterflies. April Johnson is here to teach us how to create an NDSU certified home pollinator garden. April's the NDSU Extension Pollinator Technician. Her job consists of public outreach to promote pollinator conservation. She's an avid gardener with a passion for edible landscaping and teaching others how to grow food. April, welcome to the forums. Hi, thanks for having me. Okay, let's get started. Yeah, so like Tom said, I'm the pollinator technician, which is a beautiful, wonderful, totally made up job that I am blessed to have. If I'm not talking about bees and butterflies, I'm writing about them. It's literally a dream. So if you have a garden club or other organization that would benefit from a talk like about pollinators, edible landscaping, monarch habitat, anything like that, let me know, I will be sharing my contact information at the end of our discussion. All right, why should we care about pollinator habitat? So pollinators are absolutely essential for the reproduction of many flowering plants and over 75% of the world's crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. About one out of every three bites of food we take is with the help of a pollinator. And I don't mean wind, I'm talking about living organisms. And this includes not just fruits and vegetables that we eat, yes, your cucumber, your apples, but also the pollinators make sure we have food for the other food that we eat, like cattle specifically. Pollinator sustained ecosystems by ensuring the survival of plant species. Most of the colorful blooming plants, so a lot of the stuff that Don talked about in his presentation are pollinated by living organisms. Prime pollinator habitat is shared by other wildlife as well, including birds and mammals. So if you're creating pollinator habitat, you're not just creating a home for insects, birds and other animals will enjoy it as well. And pollinator habitat is diminishing across the globe due to multiple factors like climate change, herbicides, agriculture, and urban expansion. So our initiatives, and when I say our, I mean NDSU Extension, specifically the pollinator conservation section. My role is to educate my community and promote the restoration and expansion of pollinator habitat across our region. My team and I fully believe that home gardeners can make a significant positive impact on pollinator conservation. You may think that putting in a pollinator garden, a tiny little spot makes no difference at all, but it makes a huge difference. The more humans get involved with the landscape, the farther and farther they're apart, the larger native untouched habitats become. And our job as gardeners is to try to fill in that what's called the empty matrix, the spaces between those native pollinator habitats. I'm talking with my hands, and I don't know if you can even see them, but I can't stop talking with my hands. Our impact is we have certified over 240 public and private gardens in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota since the program started in 2016. And we're up to about 4.7 million square feet of pollinator gardens that we have certified during the program. This year, we're partnering with Fargo Parks, who certify around 50 acres of new pollinator habitat. Our Be-On initiative is new. So we started it last summer where we distributed white Dutch clover seeds for 10 by 10 square foot patches. So little bags of enough seeds to cover that area. And we distributed about 60,000 square feet worth of seed. So that's pretty exciting. Clover is a drought tolerant nitrogen fixing flowering plant. It's an excellent source of pollen and nectar for bees and requires almost no maintenance. So that's why we recommend it for a Be-On. And one of my favorite aspects about clover other than the forage it provides for our bees is it stays green even when the grass in your lawn is dead. We get long periods of drought and I get sections in my yard that just turn brown. But if there's a patch of clover, it's green. If you're interested in participating in the Be-On program, I'll touch on that later, but watch for updates on our Facebook page. Okay, so what is a pollinator garden? A pollinator garden is a specially designed garden or landscaped area planted with a variety of flowers, shrubs and trees that attract and support pollinating insects. The primary goal of a pollinator garden is to provide a habitat that encourages pollinators to visit, forage for nectar and pollen and contribute to the pollination of flowering plants. We're creating a beautiful space that bees and butterflies want to live in. These gardens often feature a diverse array of native plants that bloom at different times throughout the growing season to provide food sources for pollinators year round. Additionally, pollinator gardens include nesting sites, water sources and shelter to further support the needs of our pollinators. For the benefits, I've got a list here, but I just wanna draw your attention to the two blue highlighted sections, ecosystem services. This is something that we don't talk about a lot, but all sorts of animals over the planet provide ecosystem services that would cost a lot of money and take a lot of engineering for humans to replace them. So ecosystem service for pollinators is not just pollinating our food, but they help improve soil health and water filtration and pest control. Conservation is another aspect I wanna touch on. Many pollinator species, including bees, butterflies and some birds are facing population declines due to habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change, other factors that we mentioned earlier. Pollinators, sorry, creating and preserving habitat for pollinators is crucial for their conservation and the preservation of biodiversity. So our main goal here today is to promote, restoring that pollinator habitat for lots of really good reason. Factors to consider before starting. And when I say starting, I need filling out the application to get your pollinator garden certified. You're eligible for certification if you reside in North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota or Montana and meet the guidelines in the application. That's what we're gonna touch on in the next few slides. And just before we really get into it, I wanna draw your attention to a water source availability as a bullet point. We're gonna talk about that in detail, but that's something that is sometimes missed when we start planning our pollinator gardens. Water is a key element and it's absolutely necessary for prime pollinator habitat. These are the four categories we're gonna talk about in designing your pollinator garden. There are, there's different criteria for each of these categories. So garden size, there's no official recommended size, but you will have to give an approximation in the application. So the only question about garden size is how big do you think it is? If you're looking for a recommendation, I'd say start with an eight by eight section of garden. Pressure treated landscape timbers make excellent borders. They last a long time. They're pretty inexpensive and they're sold in eight foot boards. So that's the only reason why I say eight by eight is because it's easy to put together that size space. Borders are absolutely key in making a space look intentional. So mature pollinator gardens look absolutely feral or they can't. I mean, I suppose you could have a really well-manicured one but if you're trying to mimic nature, it's gonna look natural. And so having a border is essential to letting your neighbors know that you're growing that garden on purpose. Location, it does not matter where you install your garden on your property though a spot with full sun is ideal. The application will ask you to categorize it by one of those four qualifiers in the slides, urban, rural, public, or private. Just because we like to, on our interactive map of all the gardens, we like to mark if they're public or private garden. There's no priority for either, for any of those four qualifiers. Plant selection, lots of options. We will get more into that in the next few slides. Water source, like I mentioned, you'll have to provide water but there are lots of options. And pesticide use, the last question in the application is a pledge to use, I hope you can see my hands, safe pesticide practices in the pollinator garden. The plant selection, choose plants with staggered bloom times. And you need two selections for each bloom period. So the earliest pollinators in our area to wake up are bumblebees and they start to appear mid to late April. Bubblebees can fly in colder temperatures with lower light levels than other bees. So that's why they get to go out first. The first bumblebees out will be the overwintered queens with a brood at home to feed. The, some of the plant selections, now I'll talk about a resource for a better list than what I'm gonna give you later on. But just to get started, if you're gonna take some notes, April and May, some good choices would be Columbine, Crocus, Grape Hyacinth, Prairie Smoke, June would be Blue Indigo, Catmint, Golden Alexander, Butterfly Milkweed. July, August, that would be Black Eyed Susan, Meadow Blazing Star, Purple Coneflower, Bee Balm and Swamp Milkweed. And then fall, New England Astor, Golden Rod Sedums. Now, just a note, these are native plants that I listed. You do not have to stick to native plants as long as you've got something hardy that's blooming that's not a double bloom cultivar. They work great. We just, all of our testing and research that goes into these kind of talks, we've tested on native plants. So, and those recommendations, I think I mentioned Blazing Star, there's other types of Blazing Stars, Aliatris, and they work just fine. But again, these are, I'm just giving you specific species that we have tested and we have some data on. But you're not limited to what I just told you. Water, okay. This is really fun. So a minimum of one water source is required for certification. You can be super creative with this. We got a bird bath, a butterfly puddling area. If you don't know what a butterfly puddling area is, it's a puddle. I don't know why that cracks me up when I'm just, I just say it's a puddle. It is a puddle. In your garden, it would be a section of standing water that appears frequently. Now, since we get some, we get long periods of drought in the summer, I doubt that that's gonna happen reliably in anyone's garden. But the, anyway, a butterfly puddling area is usually where a bunch of males will congregate during their mating season, and they use the puddle to suck up nutrients that leech from the soil into the water. That's the theory anyway. A fountain, a nearby pond, lake or stream. So if you live near golf course, or you live next to the river, you are golden. A water garden, and then a top plant also works as a water source. Nestor, nester, shelter and nesting sites, nester. Nesting sites are especially important for solitary bees. These are the bees that don't live in a hive. Sites can be dense vegetation, brush piles, dead wood, rock crevices, abandoned rodent dens and bare ground. Some pollinators, particularly insects like butterflies and certain bee species overwinter as adults. Sheltered locations like leaf litter, dense vegetation and hollow plant stems provide protection from freezing temperatures from all the snow. And then pollinators need resting places where they can perch and roost and rest between foraging activities. So bees and butterflies are out during the day getting all that pollen and nectar, and they do sleep, they need a place to sleep. And just like you wouldn't want to sleep outside, unprotected, expose the elements, your bees and butterflies don't want to do that either. So it's really important to have shelter in your garden. So that could look like shrubs, trees, tall grasses, and man-made structures such as fences and benches work really well. And the fences and the benches work especially well for attaching a chrysalis too. So any of your butterflies that go through a metamorphosis period, the really solid structures that aren't going to bend and move in the wind like a tree or a shrub, those are great places for attaching a chrysalis. There's some more options. A minimum of one place for pollinators to nest overwinter is required. So here's another list that I think these are the word for word, the options that are in the application that you could check. Bee house, butterfly house, provide bare ground that is not plowed. That's for your ground nesting bees. They can easily get to dig a tunnel out in the mud or in the dry ground. Don't cut down perennials in the fall. I like a tidy garden and it bothers me to leave all my dead stuff out and about. This winter was especially bad because it didn't get covered up with snow. So it's just exposed. However, this makes excellent shelter for bees and I don't have to build anything. It doesn't cost me any money. I just leave stuff out and I hesitate to clean up in the spring until temperatures get warm enough. So if you're any, if you want to know what I mean by that, the most of your pollinators are going to be out and about when it gets warm enough at night that you would feel comfortable planting a tomato outside. I don't mean from seedling. So if you think it's warm enough and you're confident that that tomato won't get too cold at night, that means it's warm enough that all the pollinators are out of those overwintering sites and you can clean up all of your debris if that's what you saved for your pollinators. A note about bee houses. These are very popular and there's a lot of cute designs and I like them as a teaching tool especially as a way to get kids to introduce them to pollinator conservation and get them excited about it. However, there is a maintenance factor that goes with bee houses. So if you're going to build a bee house you notice in this picture there's mud on the ends of the tunnels or tubes. I'm gonna call them tubes. Okay, so the baby bees inside those tubes will chew their way out of the mud and they will leave behind food that they didn't consume their waste and particles of the mud and other things that were lined that their mother used to line their nest. So they're leaving behind a dirty apartment. Next year, if you have the same bee house out and you haven't cleaned it, you're leaving an apartment building full of dirty apartments for new moms to move into. So what that does is it's a disease vector. It's not clean. Anyway, so the maintenance factor is if you want to use a bee house try to do it in a way that you can keep it clean meaning the tubes can come out and be thrown away and replaced or you can line the tubes with like a plastic straw and then take out the plastic straw at the end of the or in the spring after the bees have left and throw it away and put new ones in. So that was way too long of a note but bee houses are great for certain purposes but they have to be clean or you're risking the health of the bees that live there. Pesticide from the pollinator garden will go through this really fast. All of the following are required. This is part of like the pledge when you check the box at the end. Reduce spraying is the least toxic pesticide. Don't spray blooming plants. Spray that means don't spray the blooms and also just don't spray it when it's blooming. If you think it's gonna attract a bee at any point during the day, don't just leave it alone. Spray only late in the evening. Always follow pesticide labels. The pesticide label will usually tell you something like don't spray when bees are active or don't spray during the day and then identify the pest for taking action. I think I wanna add to that. Don't take action, okay. In a lot of cases, we have several pests here in this area that can be problematic but a lot of the time they won't do enough damage to your pollinator garden plant to prevent the plant from blooming or producing seed or surviving till the next year. So I would just hesitate to really do anything at all and usually, especially in a diverse garden like a pollinator garden, you will get, once it matures, you should get a healthy balance of pests and predators. And so the predators, their job is to take care of any outbreak of pests. Anyway, so I just identified the pest for taking action. Know what your target pest is. If you're gonna use a pesticide, use something specifically for that insect and nothing else. Anyway, this is, I could talk a long time about that but we don't need to, we can answer questions if you have more resources. So here's some QR codes. The first one is for our Pollinator Conservation Facebook page. That's where I chat all the time. I post at least twice a week. We have Fun B and Butterfly Facts. We have all the Pollinator Conservation News that's hip happening. I post stuff about events. This talk, I promoted this talk on that page and we can interact and you can ask me questions. And you'll get the first updates on when we put out new publications. The middle is our online library of Conservation and Gardening Resources Extensions Library. And then the last one is, we'll take you to the application intro page but at the bottom is that interactive map that I mentioned earlier in the talk, which has a map of all the certified home guard, certified pollinator gardens, home or public. And a lot of them, a majority of them have pictures attached. So you just click on the little icon and it will show you pictures so you can see what other people have done with their pollinator spaces. Points, pollinator gardens make a difference meaning, yes, your eight by eight space does contribute positively to pollinator conservation. You need two space each for each bloom period. That's key. So you're gonna have, was there four bloom seasons? So you're gonna have at least eight different species in your pollinator space. You need a water source and then there's pesticide mitigation. That QR code will take you to the application page. So you can, if you've already got a pollinator garden and you think it needs all the criteria, go ahead and follow that link and fill out that application. You'll get a really cute, free sign. Or if you are gonna install one this year, bookmark that, you can refer to that application if you need some more notes on, or I mean, it's the same as this presentation but if you need a reminder of what the qualifications are or if you just wanna bookmark it and save it for when you've finished your installation. I would like to open up to questions. And while we do that, I will just leave it on my contact information so you can email me anytime with follow-up questions or if you need some help planning a pollinator space, I would love to help you do that. Okay, thanks, April. All right, everybody. Now the last session, we had so many great questions. They're really all helpful and let's keep it going now. And so we've already got some questions coming on out here, April, you got a bee house, but now what's the trick to getting the bees to nest in those tubes? They will find it. Put it near your pollinator garden. So put it near where they're foraging and they'll find it ideally in kind of a sheltered space. So something that's not gonna fill up with water, hanging it on your fence works really well or mounting it on your fence or somewhere on the ground in the pollinator garden works too. So you're saying if you build it, they will come? Yes, yeah. All right, okay. How about this person uses a crop rotation of two years of red clover in a six-year rotation plan, but they don't want the red clover to go to seed. How long can they allow the blooms to bloom before they mow them so they don't go to seed? Oh, interesting. Okay, that is a question that I would have to look up to be absolutely accurate, but if there was no data on it, if we didn't know, I would test it by looking at my clover and if the blossoms are still like, moist is not the right word, but they're not dried up. So the clover of blossoms will dry up as they're going to seed. So if you test it and you're like, okay, it's still, I can still feel there's moisture in it, then you can think about mowing it. And then, but as soon as it starts getting dry, I'd be, if you don't want it to go to seed, I definitely would be mowing at that point. Makes sense. Okay, bro, in your certification process, you insist upon two plants per bloom season. Now, why are you so demanding of two plants, two species? I've never asked that question, but I think it's probably hedging your bets just in case something happened to one of the species that they would not have like a black hole in your blooming calendar. Okay, how about, would you call a honey locust or a mountain ash tree a pollinator plant? Yes. Wait, well, is a mountain, this is a stupid question, mountain ash and honey locust are two separate things, right? Yes. Okay, thanks, sorry, a trees are not my, I don't know trees very well, but I do know honey locust is a pollinator plant. And I have one of those in my front garden, so. The mountain ash has those white blooms and those beautiful orange fruits, clusters of fruits in the fall. That's right, that's right. So they bloom well. Okay, what else we got? What are some of the most common pollinators in North Dakota? Well, there's apis mellifera, which is the honey bee, European honey bee, so it's not native, but it has naturalized and taken, it's taken over the world, right? European settlers brought it everywhere. We have lots of different bumble bee species, bombus teresterus, for instance, which I think is the yellow banded bumble. I can't remember, it's common name. We need to look that up. And we have a lot of, here I'll just do categories because that's more fun. We have the metallic sweat bee, some people say sweet bee, but they're the tiny bees that are really shiny, they're usually blue or green, they're super beautiful. We have longhorn bees, we have mason bees. They will, they line their nests with mud, so you'll see a bee flying to like a wet bare ground, scooping up some mud and taking it back to its nest. Leaf cutter bees, they will, they cut little discs, almost perfectly round discs out of leaves and use that to wallpaper their nests. I'm sure I'm forgetting some of them, but we have 1,400 bee species in North America, and I feel like it's 200 and something species in North Dakota, but it's been a while since I've had that statistic in front of me. 200 different species of bees in North Dakota. Wow, how about flower colors? Are there better colors of flowers for pollinators or do different types of pollinators prefer different colors? Sure, okay, yes, yes and no. Butterflies, the research says they can learn, they don't have necessarily flower preferences, they will learn when they visit your garden which flower has the best nectar, and then they'll think, oh, I love red because this red flower has a ton of nectar, but another butterfly visiting a different garden might learn, oh, I love purple because this purple flower has more nectar or has the best of those choices. These are a little bit different. They like white, yellow, and blue or purple flowers. They will see those colors in, their eyes interpret those colors differently than humans do, so the yellow flowers look blue, I think, and the white ones might too, but they, yeah. So we have a lot of yellow and purple flowers in our recommended list for pollinator plants, but I think most of the ones I even listed in my, that slide on the plant selection, they're mostly yellow and purple. How do you feel about many clover compared to Dutch white clover? Because a concern this person has is many towns have municipal codes that limit boulevard plantings to six inches of height. So that could be an issue with the Dutch white clover? Dutch white clover grows three to four inches tall usually. Okay. It doesn't get, I'm sorry, what did you say was the maximum six? Six inches. You should be okay with Dutch white clover. Red clover gets taller, so the white should be, stay shorter, yeah. And in your water requirements, how far away does the water need to be from the plants, or how close does the water have to be near the plants? It kind of depends on which bees your pollinator garden is up supporting. Some bees and butterflies can't fly as far as others, but I know that most bees can pollinate, like when you talk about apple trees that need to cross pollination, a lot of the recommendation is 50 yards, I think. So I would say 50 yards is probably fine if you're talking about, oh, I live this far from the river, that works. Okay, here's another question. This person wants to update their mom's lawn with bulbs for early spring. And maybe it'll attract some early insects, but the mom thinks her soil is too sandy. Do you have any thoughts about that? So the question is wanting to update a lawn with bulbs. Right, naturalize. You may need some Siberian squill, maybe, or glue to the snow. Oh man, I know we have this information in our beautiful landscapes. It'll tell you if it needs sandy soil, or if it tolerates sandy soil, or you know, mess it to dry. But I don't know that off the top of my head. That would be an excellent question to email me with the contact information on your screen, and I will be happy to answer that for you tomorrow. Okay, let's get some more questions here. When is the best time to dismantle last year's pollinator garden? Oh, so cleaning up the, yeah. So that would be when it's warm enough for all the pollinators to have woken up. So if you would plant a tomato outside, so 50 degrees at night is a good temperature for that. They should be all out of the garden by then. But also, your queens will start to lay a new brood. Well, all the species are different. So I can't really make a blanket statement, but you will have ground nesting these that are active throughout the whole season. So if you get some of those in your garden, when you're cleaning up, just be, just look at where they're at and don't step on them, but they mostly bees are too busy to bother with you. How about are wasps attracted to bee houses? Yeah, there's some predatory wasps that this is another reason why I don't love bee houses is because you can get some predatory wasps that will lay an egg. They'll say, they'll see the bee house and they can lay their eggs through the mud caps and then their egg will hatch and eat the baby bees inside. So that's a risk. And then there's, I think I mentioned butterfly houses were on that list and they're in the application. And butterfly houses have been known to be colonized by paper wasps. And we have quite a lot of, we have a lot of paper wasps in this area which are attracted to building their nests on human man-made structures. So like a bee house. When you clean out the bee boxes, do you throw away the tubes that were not used? You can compost them if they're, typically those tubes are bamboo or you can use paper straws too. You can't compost your plastic straws, I'm assuming, but yeah, you can, yes, you can throw them away. You can also compost them if they're compostable material. And in these bee houses, how do you clean up the tubes? Well, so you can put a straw lining in them or just replace the tube. Okay, how about this person doesn't have a QR code and doesn't have a phone for QR codes. Is there a way to access that virtual tour without a QR code? You'll send me that, you can send me that and I'll post that on the website tomorrow. Okay, are there, can a rain garden be a pollinator garden? Yes, so a rain garden to the best of my understanding is a, it's zero escaping, so it's a garden that gets flooded sometimes but also can handle drought, right? So yes, that would be a really interesting project. I'd love to chat with someone about that who's maybe got that as a dream of theirs. Are yellow jackets pollinators? No, kill them with fire. We hate them. Will the flowers all grow first year? I would say give your pollinator garden about three years to start looking nice and full. Can use neem oil on plants? I don't wanna, I knew this question was gonna come up. And I don't know. Maybe Dawn has the answer to using neem oil or maybe knows more about that than me. I don't, I'm concerned that it might slough off some of the beneficial insect eggs, but maybe Dawn can comment on that. Okay, I think that's all on that. Drop links for your QR codes. Okay, I will drop the links during the next person's chat so you don't have to watch me look for the pages. All right, well, we wait for time to get back on. I think we'll take a five minute break and we'll find out, I think you got one more that just popped in April if you wanna take a peek at that one. Yeah, there's some more in the Q&A too. Yeah, you can pop that up and then see if there's any time to not read your off. Does the pollinator garden need to be a dedicated space or can be part of a larger garden? Yes, it can absolutely be part of a larger garden and you can incorporate it in your vegetable garden. There's a lot of data that shows that getting pollinators into your vegetable garden means bigger yield and heavier fruit even with the fruits that don't need pollinators. How does one get rid of minor bees in the ground? I have questions. Are they causing a problem? Are they bothering your pets or your kids? Are they really minor bees? There's too many questions. Send me an email and we can chat because I have questions to ask you before I can properly answer that. Are there negatives to planting a pollinator gardener on apple trees will attract apple maggots? I'm not sure what attracts apple maggots other than maggots but I have my pollinator garden stuff incorporated in my fruit trees and they all seem to be pretty happy. What natives are better for drier sandy soils? There's a lot, that's another good, so that's, send me an email. I have that data in a publication in my office. So there's some way more questions I thought there would be. You guys are great. I have an area, wow, this is detailed. I have an area I'm prepping for pollinators. I have a plastic covering the space that I planted, placed last fall. How do I best prepare the soil for planting till or no till? That is a loaded question. You don't need to tell. I would say a bunch of organic matter as long as you know where the organic matter has come from. So from your lawn clippings or your leaves, from your trees, you know they don't have a bunch of chemicals on them and keep feeding that soil with organic matter. It will soften it up naturally. It will attract a lot of biodiversity to your soil and that will be great for your pollinator garden water source. Best way to attract pollinators for early blooming fruit trees and shrubs like Juneberries and apricots. Okay, that's a good one. Okay, the best way to attract pollinators early is I plant comfrey under my fruit trees and the bees are obsessed with comfrey. And so that gets them in around my fruit trees. In the fall, I have to kill hornets. Would I still qualify? Yes, because I don't think you'd be spraying plants to kill hornets. We could cut about that in an email. The certification process happens the whole year. And I have some common milkweed that I have never seen a pollinator on although my other milkweed types are busy pollinator areas. Should I assume this common milkweed is as an issue and replace it? You certainly can. If you notice that nobody likes it, then the bees in your area and they prefer something else, then sure, if you wanna get rid of it to make room for something else, that's a perfectly fine idea. I would just check before you get rid of it, see how popular it is with the butterflies laying their eggs on it, because they really, the monarch butterflies really love common milkweed for that. Okay, do bees reproduce all summer or their certain time of the year? It depends on the species, but most bees will mate, the solitary bees, most of them will mate in the fall and have their brood by spring. Honeybees are a little bit different because they will overwinter in their hive and they generally mate in the spring and lay babies all summer long until it gets to be about time to close up the hive in the fall. How close does the wood pile need to be to the pollinator garden? It'd be great if it was in the pollinator garden, but as close as your water source is, however you've decided that 100 feet away or 50 yards, the wood pile is probably close enough for them to find it. Would you use any grasses as pollinator garden plants? Yes, grasses are great for shelter. They don't provide much pollinator sources because the bees aren't as attracted to them as your forbs. Cross pollination distance for apple trees is 50 feet. I knew when I said 50 yards, it was too long. Hey, I'm sorry, everyone. I thought that sounds really weird. That sounds too far. What are your feelings about hollyhocks? They're pretty. I don't know if they are, we haven't done any trials on hollyhocks for pollinator species or pollinator gardens. NDSU Extension does have a compiled list of pollinator flowers. It is being, the publication is being updated. So it is not currently available, but if you follow us on our Facebook page, I will let you know as soon as it is republished or re-released. Plant selections are perennials. How about annuals and containers? Yes, I guess it just depends. Anything that's double blooming is not great for pollinators. But that's what I'm thinking. When I think of pollinator annuals, I think of herbs and vegetables, which are great. We have a bee called a squash bee, that's the category of bee, and they are specifically evolved with squashes to pollinate them. So that's pretty cool. Okay, we just, I'm sorry, the power went off here. I had a poor dose here, so, but I'm glad it sounds like everything's going good here. But we just have time for one more question here. Right. Is there one in particular? Whatever you wanted. Five minutes, like 10 more in here. Let's also say this, how about we just say this, that there's so many great questions tonight. If anybody has a question that's not answered tonight, then April will be happy to answer it. Or if it's for like Don's talk, Don will be happy to answer it. And I'm also, I'm always here to help answer any regarding questions. And especially sometimes we don't ask questions if they're not really relevant to the topic, but I'm still happy to answer those questions. But how about we just, just I wanna thank you, April, for your outstanding presentation.