 Okay, so just to go ahead and get started, I just want to introduce you to the topic of beneficial insects because you may not think all insects are beneficial, and that's right, some are pests, but actually many of the insects that you find in your farms and gardens are actually beneficial, and we have those that are providing pollination services, like these bees here or the bumblebee, and that is a blueberry flower, and bumblebees have a very particular way of pollinating blueberry flowers. They use buzz pollination, so they actually vibrate their wings at a certain frequency that causes that flower to release more pollen, so there are lots of really cool biology that goes on. I primarily studied natural enemies of crop pests, things that attack crop pests, so predators and parasitoids. How many of you know what have seen a parasitoid or know what a parasitoid is? Just a few of you. So parasitoids are usually tiny wasps, sometimes they're flies, and they lay their eggs in or on the body of the insect that is their host, and that egg hatches, and the larva begins to consume the internal contents of that prey, and ultimately it will cut a hole and typically emerge and spin a cocoon on the outside of the prey, and then becomes a wasp and carries on that cycle all over again. So again, really tremendously interesting biology that goes on, and these organisms are extremely numerous. Pollination services, just some figures here, 87.5% of plants rely on pollination, and about 75% of our food crops require insect pollination, and they're worth a lot of money, $400 billion annually, and at least almost 10% of the world agricultural output is dependent on pollination, so pollinators are really important. And pollination, we think of primarily being done by honey bees, which are the managed bees that we manage in hives, but wild bees also provide a lot of pollination services and they contribute in large amounts to the sustain or the resilience in pollination services over long periods of time. So just a fun fact, Michigan is home to 465 species of bees, and many of them are brightly colored and metallic and really interesting organisms to look at. Pestopressin services are the things that are provided by the natural enemies, the predators and the parasites, and again, about a $400 billion value to U.S. cropping systems, but another thing that I think is really important is they help reduce the need for insecticides, and we've done studies that show that in many cases natural enemies are completely suppressing a cropped pest so that farmers don't have to spray pesticides or insecticides, and that goes on all the time without even being recognized, so the value is probably even higher than this, and it's really a combination of predators and parasites that cause this. I put this up here because it kind of goes from familiar to less familiar. Lady beetles, most people recognize as beneficial predators and are thinking about conserving them. Spiders, you might know, are always predacious, so they're always helping in the system, but then there are things that are less familiar. These minute pirate bugs are about a millimeter long, so about a 16th of an inch long, and they have piercing, sucking mouth parts, and they walk along plant leaves, and if they come across an aphid or an insect egg, they will pierce the egg or the aphid with their mouth parts. They'll actually inject a little enzyme that helps to digest the internal contents of their prey, and then they suck that back up as their food source. Soldier beetles are something that you see commonly on Goldenrod later in the summer. They are predacious as adults and as immature, and then parasitoid wasps. And parasitoid wasps are probably the most species rich group of insects that we have in the world. There are millions of species of parasitoid wasps. Basically every insect in the world has a parasitoid that attacks it, oftentimes many different parasitoids, and parasitoids have parasitoids that attack them, and parasitoids that attack parasitoids sometimes have parasitoids that attack them, so these relationships are extraordinarily complex and really fascinating. So how do we harness that? Well, both pollinators and natural enemies have some requirements in there for just to support their daily living. They've got to have nectar. Bees use that to produce honey, honey bees use it to produce honey, other bees use it to fuel their activities, parasitoids use nectar to fuel their activities. They need pollen, bees of course collect pollen and feed it to their offspring, but many natural enemies also feed on pollen as a source of protein, and certain natural enemies can't lay eggs. They emerge as new females, they get mated and they're ready to lay eggs, but they can't do it until they have a protein meal. So searford flies or hoverflies need that protein meal from pollen. If you're a natural enemy, you may need prey in the system all the time. You can't just have the key pest that maybe the farmer wants you to control, you will happily feed on that, but you need food for the rest of your life too, so we call that alternative prey and we can help supply that, and then they need shelter as well, they need places to overwinter, they need places to have their nests and where they may lay eggs, so those are things that we need to provide in the agricultural landscape. And we do that through what we call habitat management. This is just a term that has come up where mostly scientists talk about this, but we manage habitats specifically for beneficial insects and we call them insectary plants or insectary habitats. Okay, this is a little hard to see with the light that we have in this room, but I just wanted to make the point that humans have really changed the agricultural landscape significantly and this is actually sort of a non-urban type of situation, but this is actually in Michigan, and we have parts of the landscape that are fairly complex, they have forests and wetlands and maybe some fence rows, and if you blow it up, you can see it a little bit better, but we have other parts of the landscape that have really become very highly simplified. We have taken out those forests and the fence rows and the wetlands, we've tiled the fields so that our productivity is higher, but what that's done is it has caused a lack of those former resources that these beneficial insects need. And so in landscapes like this, you can still find places that maybe have an old field or a little edge to the field that has some floral and nectar resources, but very little in the field itself. And then in these more simplified landscapes, we tend to have even fewer floral resources for natural enemies and pollinators. So we need to think about that because there's quite convincing evidence that currently highly managed landscapes are just not good places for pollinators to live, they can't get enough food, not picking on any particular state, but I have a former student who works in a Midwestern state, and he put honeybees out in a corn soybean landscape and they had to start feeding them by August. The honeybees were losing weight, they couldn't bring in enough pollen and nectar to even maintain the weight of the hive in those highly intensified landscapes they had to start feeding them. So the idea that the bees are starving in August is kind of crazy, but that's what was happening in that landscape. Okay, so what can we do to support beneficial insects? We can create these habitats, and this is sort of what habitat management looks like on the ground. Typically we're planting a mixture of flowering plants that bloom over long periods of time. The idea is that we could create higher abundance and greater diversity of both pollinators and natural enemies. Some people are concerned about rare species of bees and we can support them as well. And the goal is that we have increased pollination and pest control services. So what's the evidence that this actually works? Forget Blau's first name, Bret Blau and Rufus Isaacs conducted an experiment in blueberries in Michigan and what they found is in a typical production setting where blueberries don't absolutely require pollination but they benefit from insect pollination that when they planted these resource habitats it increased the yield of the blueberry field to the point that within three years the farmer could pay for the installation of the habitat patch. So definitely these services are valuable and particularly where pollination is required you can get a lot of benefit from it. Okay, so in the past we often used annual plants as insectary plants. Then there's a lot of research on that that shows that they can be beneficial. But we were often using non-native plants. There was a couple of plants from California that were really very good and people started planting them and you could actually increase pollination but people became concerned that they could become invasive. So more recently the focus become on native plants and on perennial plants. So perennials are plants that once they're established they're gonna live for many years without replanting in the system. And we are also interested in having overlapping bloom periods so that we have resources continually being present in the landscape for these pollinators and natural enemies. There's a lot of lists of insectary plants out there. You can just Google insectary plants and you will find many, many lists of them. Oftentimes they're based on pretty limited data and sometimes it's just expert opinion that these are plants that might support natural enemies. You might find a list but it's really from California so who knows whether those plants grow here or whether we should have them here. And the lists are actually not very specific in what type of insect they attract and support. They basically just say this is good for pollinators but they aren't very detailed in what they actually support. So we became interested about 10 years ago, a little more in thinking about how we could do research to identify the best insectary plants for use in Michigan. And we published a couple of papers. Actually we had a SARA grant. We did three years of work. We had multiple students working on that. They published their findings and what you have is in short this, I don't have one in front of me. This is the non-scientific version of the science papers that came out here. And if you open that up, you'll see this very nice insert here that shows all the different plant species that they found to be attractive to bees and natural enemies and their bloom periods, et cetera, and shows you what those plants look like in that border around the outside. That work was done in one location near East Lansing and it was done on a site that had what we would call mesic soils. The soils were held moisture well and so they supported plants that do well in modest to high moisture conditions. But a lot of our production in Michigan, particularly fruits and vegetables, is done on much sandier soils. So all the way up to the West Coast of Michigan, we have very sandy soils, but that's where a lot of our fruit production is concentrated. And so we knew that we needed to think about what plants could we use in soils or in situations where the soil was going to be very dry. So our questions were, what do Michigan native plant species that are suitable for dry soil vary and their attractiveness to natural enemies? Can certain plant species support both pollinators and natural enemies? And from a scientific viewpoint, we were interested in whether we could explain attraction through floral traits. Here are my farmer cooperators. They're not the normal farmer cooperators. These are native plant producers who provided us with the materials that we used and a lot of advice on how we should grow those plants. And we also consulted with the Michigan Commercial Beekeepers Association because they're very interested in having pollinator resources in the landscape and they gave us some suggestions to test as well. We did this in three locations across Michigan, Southwest Research and Extension Center, Clarksville Research Center and the Traverse City Research Center. 54 plant species, they were all planted out. You can see individual one meter blocks of these plants separated by seven meters so that they were independent from one another. We visited them weekly to collect insects and they use these giant vacuum cleaners. So this is a leaf blower turned around to become a giant insect vacuum cleaner and they vacuumed the insects off of the plants and we identified them and looked at them in three different bloom periods. So I know you can't read that but it's not important. I'll break it down for you later. Just to show, yes, we had plants that were in peak bloom throughout the entire season from May into October. Okay, so here we get into the details. These are for the plants that bloom early in the season. On the left are the bees, on the right are the natural enemies. The different kinds of bees are listed here. Basically we have a lot of leaf cutter bees and a lot of sweat bees, these bands here and some bumblebees and honeybees in blue. And then in the natural enemy side, we have a lot of those parasitoid wasps, a lot of hymenopter early in the season, relatively few other insects but you'll see later other types of beneficials become common more later on. Let's just focus our attention on the best, the very best plants and go through them one by one. So one of the most attractive plants to both pollinators and natural enemies is yarrow. How many of you have yarrow growing in your garden or on your property? So yarrow is a cosmopolitan plant, it's native to this area. You may also grow cultivars of yarrow. And I know that the yellow cultivar that we have in our garden attracts no insects at all. And in some cases when we breed plants to have very showy blooms, we don't concentrate on whether they're producing nectar or not and a lot of cultivars, I shouldn't say a lot, some cultivars actually provide very little or no resources to natural enemies. You have to be careful about that. Common milkweed can be a weed in the system but it is quite attractive to both pollinators and natural enemies. Butterfly milkweed as well, round leaf ragwort, primarily to pollinators and then prairie sink foil, again primarily to pollinators. In the middle season, again, we had the same sort of thing but you can now see that we have fewer mega-kylids, more elliptids and quite a bit more apids which are the honeybees and the bumblebees. And you might wonder why this bar is so prominently large. It's because bumblebees love monarda. If you have monarda growing in your garden, either the red varieties or this native type, they really love monarda. It's just covered up with bumblebees as it blooms. Goldenrod is quite attractive to both pollinators and natural enemies. Hairy Mountain Mint, kind of a surprise. That was one that was actually promoted to us by beekeepers and they wanted us to look at mountain mints. There's several different kinds and this Hairy Mountain Mint is actually quite attractive interestingly not to pollinators. That's why the beekeepers were recommending it but actually to natural enemies. Strawberry St. John's wort and Mountain Mint again. Okay, so now's the quiz period. Are you seeing any patterns in the types of flowers that are attractive to these insects? You've seen two sets so far. Any patterns? The ones that are hard to kill. Milkweed is hard to kill. What else? Flowers and clusters? Yes, definitely. All of these have flowers and clusters. We call that an inflorescence. They can be made up of multiple flowers that each have a little nectare in them. Any other patterns? Is color important? Yellow and white? But you know what? There's a lot of yellow and white flowers and it's really hard to find purple flowers. Color is probably not so important in this case and remember we see color in one way but bees and other insects are seeing color in the ultraviolet light. So color is actually not super important. If we think about the last part we now have lots more bumblebees and honeybees, very much fewer parasitoids, getting more beetles being attracted later in the season. Late in the season here, showy goldenrod, again a large inflorescence, tall coreopsis, stiff goldenrod, early goldenrod and silky aster. Silky aster is great. It starts blooming in August and it'll bloom up until hard frost. Yes. It's dryness. What's that? It's the planting. Yes, in fact we selected all of these plants. Absolutely true. All these plants were selected to grow in dry sites. So we knew from the start that they would probably do well in dry sites. Little science for you. We were interested in, can we just simply say things that are often attractive to natural enemies are often attractive to bees? And there's a general trend but it doesn't explain much of the variation and you have these big outliers, things that these are plants that are super attractive to natural enemies but don't really attract that many bees. And here you have Monarda which is super attractive to bees but doesn't really attract very many natural enemies interestingly. So you have this list. I won't spend a lot of time on that but I will sort of finish up with this idea of flower traits. So we tested 54 species. There are thousands of species of plants that you could potentially grow that might support natural enemies. And it's hard to test it. It took us three years to do this. One year to plant them and get them established. Two more years of research. It's a lot of work. So if we can find some traits, some characteristics of flowers that are oftentimes associated with attractiveness, if you're from New Jersey you might be able to use that information without having to go through this level of detail. So, and we can also think about what mechanisms might influence insect visitation patterns and that's more of a scientific interest. So we measured a lot of things about these flowers. Corolla width, pollen availability, flower height, the height of the tallest flower. Floral area, flower hue, that's part of the color. Numbers of flowers, the week of peak bloom. And we did a big statistical model to ask which of these might be correlated with attractiveness. And so here's our pollinators on one side and our natural enemies on the other side. And you get a lot of different trends. And it's kind of mind-boggling what's going on here. So I'll break it down for you. Floral area, floral area was most consistently the factor that was attributed or correlated with positive attractiveness to natural enemies and pollinators. And it's actually floral area per time of year. So early in the year, we tend to have smaller plants that have smaller flowers but the ones that have relatively more floral area compared to their neighbors or the other things that are blooming at that time tend to be the most attractive. Late in the season we tend to get bigger plants that just naturally have bigger flowers but the ones that have the biggest floral area that they're displaying to insects tend to be the ones that are most attractive. So that's actually a quite handy thing. Anyone in the world can probably use that information and possibly come up with positive results. So finally, just to wrap up, if you're thinking about doing this, you're gonna have some considerations. We did it in a research fashion but you would do it in an application. I would suggest starting small and first getting to know your native plant producers and what types of products they provide, whether you want to plant seeds or whether you want to plant actual plants. If you're doing it in sort of a garden-sized operation, planting plugs is probably a very practical way to go. If you're trying to seed a half an acre, you're definitely into using seeds to do that. What are your primary goals? Are you trying to support pollinators or natural enemies or both? Do you actually need more habitat? Maybe you're in a part of the landscape that is super abundant with floral resources and if so, research has shown that adding more is not gonna really give you a big benefit but most of us are in places that could benefit from more resources. You have to know your soil type to decide what type of plant's gonna grow there. Are you gonna do it yourself or are you gonna hire a contractor? Are you with native connections by chance? Okay, so there's one of your contractors over there. You need to think about site selection. The soil needs to be prepared in the right way. You have to get the right plants, decide whether you're seeding or planting and know that you will, with these native plants that are more prairie style, be babying them along for about a year and a half. You actually plant the plants, or if you seed them, you seed them, let them grow but the weeds actually grow faster and you'll probably want to mow that patch maybe two or three times the first season, maybe once or twice the second season and it's really in the third year that they look like this. So you have to have some patience and you have to have some knowledge about what is the process that you wanna undergo. So places to get some more knowledge. Everything that I've talked about today here is really on this website, which you have a little bookmark that has the URL for that so you don't have to write anything down but we have our plant selection tool in there and you can go in there, for example, and say where you are in Michigan, what types of soils you have, whether you want to attract native or natural enemies or pollinators, your light conditions, bloom periods that you're interested in and when you click that, it will push out a list of plants that are appropriate for those conditions. That's up and running on the website. You can do that this afternoon if you'd like. And with that, I think I'm actually a few minutes over time but I want to thank all my colleagues, native plant producers and the undergraduates who really did all the work on the project.