 Good evening everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Kendra Sakamoto, I'm one of the librarians at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. I recognize that we are all in different places this evening and I would like to acknowledge that the library sits on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish, Slewa tooth and Musqueam nations. I think gardening for food is deeply rooted in having a close relationship with the land. You really can't garden without having a really healthy relationship with the land and the soil that you're working on. The Coast Salish peoples in this part of the world have been the careful caretakers of these lands since time immemorial. I strive to have a respectful relationship with the land and to learn from all of those who have always lived in harmony with the land. Tonight I'm delighted to welcome Linda Gilkison. Linda is a master gardener and has a PhD in entomology. She spent years working for the provincial government promoting programs to reduce and eliminate pesticide use. She was the head of the provincial state of environment reporting unit and the executive director of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy. She's the author of the remarkable gardening book Backyard Bounty the Complete Guide to Year Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest. Welcome Linda. Well hello. So it's great to be speaking to you tonight. I imagine if some of you are gardeners, you've been out and I wonder if you're having the same experience I've been having in my garden, which is where are the bees? Where's my pollinators? What's going on? I have a little colony of mason bees, but I don't see much else going on and it really concerns me. And that's why the subject of this talk tonight is really near and dear to my heart. So where have all the insects gone? Well, they've been going for a while. It's served. It turns out the bad news has been accumulating for some time. Oh, more than 10 years ago, a study came out reviewing papers that monitored that tracked some species over time. Now, I'll just to put this in context, there are between 10 and 30 million species of insects. So the research papers that this group found, they tracked only 452 species. But those with a history or of records going back 40 years showed a 45% drop in populations. So that's very concerning. And in 2017, this paper came out and this one really, I was going to say set the entomologists abuzz, if you can stand the pun. But these were 27 years of records from 63 protected natural areas in Germany. So this is not where pesticides are being used or any agricultural activities or people are not living there. So, and these entomologists have been were tracking species and numbers of insects over time for with very accurate records, and they found more than an 80% decrease in insects present. It was actually larger. It's sometimes of the year it was even more of a decrease in airborne insect biomass and what that means is is insects flying by that we're landing in the various kinds of trapping or sampling devices they were using. That really caught people's attention because the record, it just went straight down. So various other papers have come up. I didn't, I used to go through all the papers at the time but I don't need more I've just picked these out because they're kind of markers along the way in 2019 another review of all of the existing research because entomologists started scrambling like mad, looking for data and looking for papers looking for studies of in the past and then they would rush out and do a new study and in the present to be able to compare the numbers. And these people found in their review of what was available that there's a risk of possible extinction of 40% of insect species in the next few decades. They started tracking different insect groups and found that the rate of extinction for bees and ants and beetles which is a critical group of insects, beetles are the largest group of insects. That rate of extinction was eight times higher than it is for mammals or birds that we're a lot more aware of right now. Another summary looking for global studies showed that the terrestrial insects were declining about 9% per decade, which is just about the number that keeps coming up in all of these studies we're tracking, but around 9 or 10% per decade drop in insect total numbers. Now, why should we care. Now, I don't know, I probably should go back here I don't know how many of you noticed that you're not having insects hit the windshield anymore. The entomologists dubbed this the windshield effect some years ago when they started looking into this and they may and a lot of people did what I did which is I just assumed. I noticed that we didn't hit insects I'm not getting any insects on my windshield when I was a kid. Every time we stopped for gas somewhere you had to wash the windshield and wash the headlights and the grills of cars and trucks were covered with smashed bugs. Now that doesn't happen anymore and I assumed it was because cars are more aerodynamic and oh well the bugs are there but they're just blowing over the top of the car because how could it possibly be that we would actually have so many fewer insects that we would see it that way. But in fact that's the case I mean there's a British entomologist that's been driving the same 1950s pickup truck around and recording the splats on his windshield since then and yes they're just they're not there. People have been driving around with big nets on top of their car and with pieces of glass straight up in front so the insects will hit it they're just not there. So that's the windshield effect and everyone notices it now. If you're in a garden you really notice how many fewer insects are around our gardens in the spring. So why should we care. Well a couple you know important ecologists EO Wilson said if insects were to vanish the environment would collapse in chaos. The problem with insects is they're really really little and they underpin an incredible amount of stuff that goes on in the world and we don't we don't know what you know how important they were till they're not there. Doug Talamé the second quote here is an ecologist working right now insects are the primary means by which the food created by plants is delivered to animals. Now we all know insects pollinate flowers most people are aware at least of honey bees and maybe other bees. But there are of course many other insects that do pollination as well. You know pollination by insects is vital for most plants to survive 87% of all plants and it's more than 90% of the flowering plants depend on pollinators to be able to reproduce. So if you think about a cabbage plant well we don't depend on pollinators to give us a cabbage the cabbage but we we utterly depend on them to pollinate the flowers so they'll be seeds to grow cabbages from you know the next season. In a recent study I was quite shocked that you know that's biting globally that they figured just inadequate pollination is cutting global production of fruit vegetables and nuts 5%. So a third of our human food plants require pollination and that's about 100 crops in Canada, but in a very major part of the diet of a quarter of all the birds and mammals on the planet also depend on fruit and seeds that come from pollination. And the pollinators are not just bees as I mentioned they're not certainly not just honey bees honey bees actually pollinate a very limited range of plants. But there are thousands of species of native bees. We have 32 species of just bumble bees alone in on the BC coast here. But it's not just bees there are flies wasps moths beetles, and it's estimated that the value of that group that the ones that are not bees is equal to the value of the ones that are bees. So they do up to half of all the flower visits, they're better at pollinating some plants, even when bees are present, you get better pollination when these other insects have access to the flowers. They often get to different parts of the flower or flowers on a different part of the plant, and some things like flies carry pollen much farther than bees do. And we're only really in recent years becoming to realize how critical moths are, they pollinate at night. I think most of us just thought they flew around lights at night, but they actually do some really important percentage of pollination. The pictures are all flies and that's the second largest group of pollinators after all the kinds of bees. Now, pollination is something a lot of people are aware of, but as gardeners you're probably also quite aware how important some insects are because they prey on or they parasitize pests. Though these are just a few of the thousands of native aphid predators. This beautiful fly here has larvae that look kind of like little slugs, but they're eating madly eating their way through this colony of aphids on a cabbage. This tiny little orange larva here is eating aphids. It's one of the most common aphid predators around, never gets any bigger than this, so most people miss it. And there are all sorts of lady beetles and this is a immature lady beetle if you're wondering what this funny little critter is. But there are many, many kinds that just prey on aphids, never mind caterpillars and other problems that occur in our garden. But even the pollinators and the predators and the parasites are still just a tiny fraction of what insects do in the world. You know, and of that 10 to 30 million species, most of which we don't know who they even are. It's estimated that less than a tenth of 1% are actually what we would consider pests. So what's everybody else doing? Well, in every ecosystem on the planet, they are key players in building soil and aerating soil decomposing. In this case, there's carrion beetle picture here, sorry about it. I hope you're not eating your dinner in front of the screen. They're decomposing organic material, any kind of plant material, animals, but nutrient cycling. They're part of what ecologists generally call ecosystem services. It's how the world works. They're absolutely essential recyclers. By the way, this is a native little beetle here, little dung beetle, and this is a carrion beetle. So insects make the existence of plants possible. Plants are capturing energy from the sun and turning it through photosynthesis into biomass, into leaves. And insects eating those leaves move those nutrients on to the next level in the ecosystem or through the food web. They digest it, other animals get it, some of that goes to the soil, some of it goes sooner or later to the soil and provides nutrients for plants. And of course, pollination is important because plants can reproduce. So just think about caterpillars. They eat leaves, yes. Now, are they just pests of plants? Or think about them as an essential pathway for nutrients to get to the wider food web. And I've specifically mentioned carotenoids here. Baby birds need a diet rich in carotenoids. Plants are rich in carotenoids. Baby birds are not fed leaves. They are fed caterpillars that have eaten leaves. Caterpillars are very rich in protein, fat, and carotenoids. And then a soft skin and a bird can bring that to a chick and stuff it down its throat and it won't choke. I mean, this is their utterly essential diets for birds. So insects make the existence of animals possible. I mean, most vertebrates that eat insects that ate plants. In fact, nearly all terrestrial birds, not the oceanic or the aquatic water birds, most of them rely on insects to feed their young. And I've heard people say, well, no, no, they such and such eat seeds. As adults, many birds eat seeds, but those birds are still reliant on caterpillars to feed their chicks. You can't stuff seeds down a tiny little baby chick. And the birds that are dependent through their whole life on caterpillars, the insectivorous birds, that group's declining faster than other bird groups in North America. And then the percentage they've gone down mirrors the percentage that insect populations have gone down. Dr. Talamie, who I cited at the beginning, one of his graduate students was counting how many chicks it took for one pair of chickadees to raise, sorry, how many caterpillars it took for one pair of chickadees to raise a nest of chicks. And they found, she found that it was 9,000 caterpillars were required just for that one nest to get them to fledging. That's not, you know, they even eat more than that because the parents kept feeding them after they fledged for a while. So that is for one nest of birds. It needs an enormous amount of caterpillars. Insects also do other things. We have all kinds of aquatic species that are, when they're living in the water, usually it's the larval stage, they have gills and they clean the water. When they're filter feeders, they consume algae and microbes in the water and turn it into biomass and, you know, a mosquito, for example, turns, you know, basically little particles of crud in the water into an insect body that hatches into something that fish and birds can eat. So even mosquitoes have a value, but there are many, many more insects than just mosquitoes that do this. So how do our activities affect insects? Well, in, you know, in common with our activities, the effect of our activities on other animals, our most pervasive impact is that we're destroying natural habitat. Whether it's for our farms or industry or someplace for us to live, urbanization or paved roads, we've removed a tremendous amount of vegetation and native plants. Of course, pesticides were designed to kill insects. We've been waging war on insects for over 100 years in a very concerted way. And then things that our activities are causing, climate change, for example, are as it is affecting other animals, affecting insects as well, and rising carbon dioxide, which I'll talk about in a moment, is directly affecting insects too. And then there are, that's global effects, but there are local impacts. I mean, light pollution, lights at night are really quite detrimental. And there's air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution. I'll talk about these. But loss of habitat, you know, as we've removed native pollen and nectar flowers and host plants for caterpillars, for example, you know, you can't have caterpillars without plants that they eat. And any of any of our activities that have wiped out where insects nest and pupate, then when the larvae go to the next stage, the pupa stage needs a safe place to be, because the insect can't run away until it hatches out of the cocoon or comes out of the chrysalis or hatches out of its pupa case. So we've removed all of this, so they have really nowhere to live, nothing to eat. And, you know, non-native plants don't have the insects eating them that native plants do. So the more we've spread, and the spread of invasive plants in invasive non-native plants is even worse. Doug Talamy's work shows that the loss of native plants may be the greatest contributor to the decline of insect populations. There are scientists that argue that some of these other impacts that I've just mentioned are greater, but it is really important that there's no food out there. This yard here, a lot of this plant material isn't really chewed up much by insects at all. And it's just as barren as this yard from a point of view of many insects. Unless you're an insect that eats lawn, and then away they go, oh my, a monoculture of lawn. So here's the problem with non-native plants. Most insects that eat plants eat only a few kinds, just a few closely related species. They might only just eat one kind of plant, and most of them are very limited in what they will eat. They'll just starve to death if there's no plants available that they need to have. And, you know, if the other animals are depending on insects that eat other insects that are depending on plant feeders to survive, the whole thing falls apart. So wherever we found, you know, research that's been done has shown quite conclusively that wherever we've massively altered the landscape, whether it's agriculture or in forestry, you know, planting trees that were not native, are landscape ornamentals. And the invasive plants around the edges that have gotten in in our colonizing waste areas, wherever they've replaced native plants, there's just fewer insect species and smaller populations of insects. And some very detailed work was done in Vancouver on bees showing that. So horticulturalists, of which of course I'm one, has spread the most species of non-native plants around the world. You simply have to just go to gardens, go to, you know, beautiful landscapes, go to specialty gardens. It's completely full of non-native plants. So just to show you a few caterpillars here, 70% of all species of caterpillars, and these will grow up to be moths, feed on only one family of plant. Bed straw hawk moth, big poplar sphinx, they're named after the plants that they eat. Of course, pesticides kill, and we've been at that for some time. Pesticides include insecticides of course, but also things meant to kill mites, miticides and fungicides and herbicides that are meant to kill weeds. And you know, the problem with the neonicotinoids, which people are calling neonics, was kind of just the latest chapter in a very long history of trying to exterminate insects. And unfortunately, this particular one, a group of products or active ingredients, particularly backfired on bees, because these are systemic chemicals that get in the plant, moved around in the sap, and they came out basically in the nectar. And who picked up the nectar? Even things like fungicides, which are meant to kill fungal pathogens, stop spores from germinating or otherwise control fungi, they change the way the plants smell and the insects don't recognize the plants. And also some of them actually just kill insects directly, like things like sulfur are quite toxic just directly. The use of herbicides has taken away host plants and pollen and nectar sources. If you think of a weedy ditch full of all sorts of different things blooming, those were important plants. Think of a ditch of dandelions. How critical that is. Dandelions are one of the most critical urban plants there is. And a ditch full of dandelions is a joyful thing. But if you're going to use herbicides to prevent that from happening, then we're removing a lot of food for insects. And even the least toxic pesticides, I mean, people think that soap is safe. Well, it's not. It can, it can kill, it kills any insects it gets on, but it also makes the leaves stinky, according to the insects point of view, so that they're repelled from coming. For example, if it was a predator on aphids, they won't come to the leaves and lay eggs on aphids around the aphids that have come back on the plants where soap was used. So the predators go looking for a leaf that's not been treated. They're very, very acute senses. So now we get to the rising average temperatures globally. Like other animals, the insects and plants are getting desynchronized as the as the seasons are odd. They're late or they're early. They're not matching day length that plants have evolved with or insects have evolved with so things can emerge at the different at different times. And distribution of host plants is changing, you know, as as the habitats dry up and here's some cedar that's dying in my neighborhood. And probably the most high profile native plant that's disappearing really rapidly from this region and nectar sources dry up in the summer when it's hot and dry and pollinators don't survive if there's no food. And then of course forest fires wipe out massive amounts of habitat. He waves kill directly and anybody that was here during the heat dome knows perfectly well. You know, a lot of people died hundreds of people died, but a lot of marine organisms died and we could see them because they were on the beaches, stinking up the place died they died they estimated that billions of marine organisms died. But insects would have died to but they would have just fallen out of the sky and we wouldn't have seen them. But it's it's known that high temperatures do kill insects and it's suspected in this paper here that the bumblebee populations in North America, they're all going down. It's it's linked, they're half of what they once were. And they correlate that with the frequency of extreme heat like heat waves coming periodically. And some other research is beginning to show that exposing male insects to heat waves. ruins their sperm. And after two heat waves they could be sterile. I, it's not just the fact that it's getting warmer on average and these things are happening. But the fact that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere has been rising steadily also has another effect on plants and human food. The protein levels in our, you know, food crops is dropping. The sugar levels are increasing. The minerals such as iron and zinc is decreasing. And it's because the plants are being grown in higher carbon dioxide environment. So you get more sugars less protein. And these researchers decided that they would see if something like that might be happening to an insect diet. The protein in pollen is critical for the larvae of bees. Baby bees are raised on pollen. But the adults drink some nectar and take it back. If it's a honey, a honey beehive, they'll take it back and make honey out of it. But basically the adults are eating nectar and the baby bees are eating protein rich pollen. And these researchers went back and looked at goldenrod pollen in herbarium specimens since 1874 and they found that the protein content had dropped 30% since then. And most of that decline was after 1960 and it's really correlated with the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They also compared in this case it was honey bees that they were raising, raising them on this poorer quality pollen and they have shorter life spans. They have behavior that isn't the same as it used to be. They're less vigorous. And one of the authors in a press release said that pollen is becoming junk food for bees. And of course the bees don't realize that they're going out and getting junk food for their larvae and bringing it home because the bee isn't eating that. The bee is just bringing it home to feed the larvae. Lighting at night is quite problematical for quite a few species of insects. More than half, over 60% of our insects are nocturnal. When they're out in the dark, navigating and doing what they're supposed to be doing, night lighting pulls them away from where they're supposed to be. They may just fly around a light till they die of exhaustion or predators will lurk in there and get them. I remember if you've, you know, ever sat and watched geckos in Hawaii or someplace like that at night, they go up and sit by the light and just catch insects as they show up. So, but if they're flying around a light or being attracted to a light, they're not where they're supposed to be. The other thing about light at night is it changes their internal clocks for this research here, which I did many, many years ago. Now, I found that parking lot lights in a, in a, at the university where I was working were screwing up my research projects, which were on behavior that insects do when they're getting ready for winter as the days get shorter. The short day is a signal that changes the, what changes insects change their blood actually to have antifreeze compounds in it. And they also change their behavior and start looking for little safe places to be for the winter. Well, that's day length. Well, when the days get shorter, that's supposed to happen, but days weren't getting, you know, shorter because the parking lot lights were actually enough to prevent my insects from doing their normal physiological preparation for winter because it was light enough that they just completely upset their, their internal clock. So it affects the abundance of insects, nightlights, it affects who's there, the movement of pollen because as I said, mods are turning out to be very important pollinators. Artificial light at night, there's a NASA map, regions with the sharpest decline in flying insects have the highest levels of light pollution. Well, you'd expect that just surely based on the fact that light pollution, the more lights there are, the more likely it is an urban environment or altered environment and paving and all, all kinds of other disruption. But they're starting to tease this apart now. And this one study I'm just citing here, this was in the UK where they matched streets with street lights and streets without them they tried matching streets that were otherwise very similar in terms of vegetation. And they found that where there were street lights, there were half as many caterpillars compared to the areas that didn't have street lights. And you might think, oh, that's great, nothing's eating my tree. But in fact, that's not great because what are the birds going to eat? So it is found that night lighting decreases pollination by moths. The value of them, it was found that night lighting or lights that are disrupting moth behavior at night reduced their visits to plants by 62% compared to the dark areas. And that directly translated into crop loss. This was apples in this case, 13% lower fruit set. Even though the bees and flies and other insects were present during the day, they weren't excluded from the orchard. And later studies have been showing just how important moths really are. So air pollution, you know, ozone and nitric oxide in the atmosphere or sorry in local air impairs the ability of insects to find the flowers that they depend on. The chemicals in the air make the flower scents break down a lot faster. So the scent doesn't travel very far. And instead of miles, it's traveling a few meters. It's breaking down in minutes rather than hours, which means how are insects supposed to find a flower where their pollen and nectar is if they can't smell it. And this recent study here in the UK found that a 70% drop in pollinators and a 90% drop in flower visits when in food crops that were being grown with the level of air pollution that is what's found near major roads. And that translated into the plants also having much lower yields. So the insects were not there or they were being affected by probably the air pollution in the areas making them very hard to find their plants. So this is quite a litany of all the disastrous things. So what can we do? Well, you know, here's the thing to remember about insects. They're really little. Local conservation actions matter. You can change the whole world for a species in a very small yard or a small area or a park or roadsides changing the plantings. So they live in such small worlds that it's quite possible to make a big difference in local biodiversity. This example here, this is the native sedum, sedum spathialifolium. And I live on one side of a mountain on Salt Spring where there isn't much of it, but just over the mountain, literally over the top of the mountain. There's a lot of it because it's the sunny side. And when I put all my rockery and rock walls in, I went and got little chips and slips and planted it all because I have a very hot dry garden that was perfect. And I just did it because I thought, this will be a great plant. I won't have to water it. And it's native. And it turns out that I now have a little colony of mosses elphins that live in my yard or in my immediate area because that's the only plant those butterfly caterpillars can eat. So what insects need is food for adults and larvae. And sometimes, I mean, often the adults are eating different things than maybe after pollen and nectar, but the larvae are after leaves or they're after pollen or something. So other insects, whatever they need, they need the food. They need a safe environment without someone using pesticides or other hazards like bug zapping lights and things like that. In our region, they need water in the summertime, a lot of insects. If you're eating a leaf, you're getting your moisture. But if you're the moth that has to lay the eggs to make the caterpillar or the hoverfly that's going to come and eat aphids or lay eggs for larvae that will eat aphids, if you're not directly feeding on plants, the dry environment with no dew in our region in the hottest dryest part of the year can be very, can really shorten an insect's life. And then they need protected places for their pupae and where to overwinter and nest sites. So the, you know, the native plants are really important because the non-native plants are just not recognized as food plants. The lot of insects can come to all kinds of non-native plants for nectar and pollen. Now many can come to quite a variety of plants and use that pollen and nectar, although not all of them do, but the ones that eat plants, and that's like the caterpillars and butterflies, there's no butterflies if you don't have the plant for the caterpillar to eat. I always cringe when I see a butterfly garden listed somewhere of, you know, how to plant for butterflies and all it is is nectar plants for the adults. They can get nectar from a lot of places. What's critically missing is somewhere for them to lay their eggs so that there would be another generation. Now some of our native plants support a lot more different insect species than others. And this is a term that you'll see ecologists use, which is keystone species. They have an outsized benefit to the environment compared to some of the others. And one of ours is Gary Oak. The especially valuable trees are oak and cherry, willow and alder. There's so many insects have larvae that feed on those plants or come to the flowers. For example, for Gary Oak in the Pacific Northwest, there's 436 moth species use that as a host plant. So rather than avoiding oak, because it gets caterpillars every now and then, we should be really doing what we can to make sure we get plants out in the environment that caterpillars like. Two really important plants for us, flowers, are golden rods and Douglas Aster. And this is, this is golden rod, you see a little butterfly here. Actually, there's, yeah, there's so anyway, this is the Douglas Aster. And they bloom, excuse me, they bloom later in the season, just when we don't have very much food for insects, and they're very rich pollen sources and well recognized by native insects. And if you're looking for a really good read, Nature's Best Hope is a excellent read, it's very accessible. And it's Douglas Talamie and I'll show you a picture of that at the end of the talk. So one thing we can do is, is start really getting native trees, shrubs and flowers into our landscapes, replacing, filling in, adding to. Many of these are really trouble free, they, they don't need water in the summer, little or no water. So which is very important is, you know, I don't need to tell you guys because we all live here and we're all looking at an extremely dry summer coming with not very much water stored up where it should be no snowpack and our reservoirs are not looking too good. So plants that don't need summer irrigation are going to be very high on our list for landscaping. But you know, red flowering current right now is just beyond spectacular. I mean, people are slowing down to drive by my red flowering current in the yard, you know, on the road because it's so spectacular. It's gone for six, seven weeks in the spring that and there's just a lot of native plant material that is really stunning and at least the equal of some of the non native material that you might be used to seeing. So again, thinking about hosts for the entire insect life cycle. This is really the point that I've just made before. If you don't have food for larvae you don't have the caterpillars that will become butterflies. Five of our native butterflies need stinging nettles to feed on. And three of those species are obligate on stinging little they can't eat anything else. There's a couple there's some butterflies have their little wider host range of plants but you know three of these we won't have them if there's no stinging nettles for example. And this little parasitic wasp this is a common native wasp it's one that would lay eggs intent caterpillars and other other caterpillars that we consider pests in our trees. She needs nectar. That's what she drinks, but she's got to have caterpillars to lay her eggs in or there won't be another generation of her either. So, we can look at planting. If you're looking at your yard and thinking well what can I put in here. The priority would be for plants. That bloom all season long and most of us already have a lot of spring flowers, or spring blooming trees, or even native trees around like our beauties and maple that are provided tremendous amount of pollen and nectar in the spring. So we are really well situated for spring flowers, where the whole thing kind of falls apart in this region is that are in the summer things dry up and brown out, and we're really lacking in rich supply of food for late summer and fall. And this is when insects are all getting ready to go into, well, it's equivalent to hibernation is called diapause, but they're getting ready for winter. And the insects that are going to overwinter as adults, they'll be filling these heads of golden rod, eating pollen like mad to get that protein level up and, you know, and fat for their bodies and insects like bumble bees that reproduce all summer. Have their new queens and males in the fall and they mate and everybody dies except that queen, and she goes off to hibernate. Well, if they didn't have enough food to get through the summer. Then there is no more queens and in the laboratory, the B lab, Dr. L's lab and at Simon Fraser has estimated that half the bumble bee colonies in this region generally starve out every summer. There just isn't food for them. So if you want to prioritize something to do in terms of planting look at enriching that late summer and fall bloom. So, you know, common snowberry, which is very humble little plant actually blooms pretty much all year. It's one of the best, you know, pearly everlasting absolutely you can grow this in the driest environment you can imagine. The golden rod and Douglas asked her that I've showed you are absolutely fantastic plants and and do not worry about allergies. I know that people that live in the east have golden rod all mixed up with ragweed that both plants that bloom at the end of the summer and they had their yellowish flowers. I don't think they look alike at all but they do have yellow flowers and people think that they're terrible ragweed allergies, which is quite common. They blame it on golden rod ragweed is wind pollinated so it produces an enormous amount of pollen. It's like these conifers right there right now leaving so much pollen everywhere on on every surface. It's because they're wind pollinated but golden rod is insect pollinated that pollen doesn't blow anywhere it sticks to the insects and they carry it to the next flowers. So plant a variety of flowers. Insects are really diverse their mouth parts are very diverse somehow long tubes that they can drink into the bottom of a very narrow deep neck flower. They have flat little faces like this beetle. They can't drink in a deep flower at all they have to get their pollen out of flat flowers. So tiny little parasitic wasps need tiny little flowers. They might drown if they tried to get nectar out of something like a fox glove. So, you know, trumpet flowers, little flowers, flat flowers, a variety. Flower diversity equals pollen diversity and especially this is urgent in light of this research on the golden rod pollen. If protein content is decreasing in pollen generally. And bees don't seem to really realize that obviously they don't take more food to feed their larvae when the food quality is poor. But what they do do is they forage a lot of different pollens, and it's different amino acids in the pollen different protein contents they can complement each other it's like when we cook beans and rice together. It's a better diet than if we ate rice in one meal and beans in a different meal so combining the types of protein. The amino acids will improve their diet. If we're planning for pollinators, the, you know, the rule of thumb is to at least have 50% native plants and plant in masses and pollinators need a certain number of flowers of one kind visible noticeable for them to find it. And that's kind of like think of a square meter of flowers or five or 10 plants of any one thing so rather than one of this and one of that try and plant clumps of or, you know, lines or rows or or batches of similar plants, but also still grow many different plants, because more insects visit where there's at least eight flowers species of flowers blooming. So a monoculture of the same area would not have nearly as many insects as that same area planted but into like eight more eight different kinds of flowers blooming. So if you're planting to attract pests into your garden, or sorry, natural enemies of pests into your garden, then the predators and parasitic insects that we want that control caterpillars and aphids for example, our lady beetles and lace wings and they come into these really tiny little nectar rich flowers it's amazing how much nectar there is in a little dill flower and pollen as well and lady beetle adults eat pollen as well. So yellow flowers really are particularly attractive to hoverflies and a lot of insects visit some pretty common garden plants like sweet elissum that little white tiny little white thing. Goldenrod Aster Yero, candy tuft, lots of different things. As far as choosing other kinds of flowers, look for the least modified ones. You know, you, I, it sort of drives me nuts looking in a, in a seed catalog seeing, for example, the sunflower, cutting sunflowers listed as being pollinator friendly, there'd be a little picture of a bee beside it. Well, actually, these have been bred not to have pollen, because pollen falls out on the dining room table when you put these in a bouquet so they've bred these to have no pollen. They may still have some nectar, but that that's, you know, anytime that we've bred different colors, the insects may not recognize them that they don't look the same to insects. They, they don't necessarily have access to nectar and those the flowers that are double flowers or unusual flower shapes for the kind of flower, the insects can't get at the nectar if it's even there. So double mutations, you know, unusual colors, this is what we want to avoid. Echinacea, which is actually a prairie native is actually a fantastic pollinator plant. But this is the original Echinacea. We see lots of really interesting colors in the nurseries, but people have, you know, compared the impact or sorry, the attractiveness to bees, for example, and this is that they're just not attractive to bees in the same way that the original unimproved one is. Now, the good news is the unimproved flowers, you can grow them from seed and they're really cheap as compared to going out and buying hybrid, beautiful double flower unusual colors that the variety of the season sort of plants. You can grow a lot of things that are really quite inexpensive to grow. Oh, and I'm just reminding you that deer browsing have removed understory plants around the region and, you know, the pollinators and other insects depended on those. So the more deer grazing there is the less insect habitat there often is. And also when you're growing out plants for deer, I actually have great results just planting shrubs that have flowering plants over the, flowers over the season that are attracting insects because the shrubs can get tall enough that if I protect them for a few years then I can take the barriers off. Here's Mahonia and red flowering current and actually this group of plants I've actually taken the barrier off now and then deer nibble the bottoms, but the tops are completely covered with flowers. And there are some deer resistant perennials that are really good at providing food for pollinators and beneficial insects. Beware of invasive plants, you know, butterfly bush keeps getting on these lists of butterfly gardens. Well, there is not a single species of butterfly whose caterpillar uses this as a host plant. It's a great nectar source. But if you put up, if you're growing a native Philadelphus, which is a mock orange, it's just exactly the same. I can go, I have one growing along the, put along the road by my garden and it doesn't need water. It's huge. It's spectacular. It scents up this whole corner of the neighborhood with this really sweet scent and it just is a butterfly magnet. And it's just a native plant. We don't need Budlia. Watch out for bachelor buttons, which are in the centauria anyway. They're often in those, quote, wildflower mixes. You know, the can of a mix that you're a seed package that you get somewhere. It could have some very invasive species in it. Baby's breath. That's a very invasive sumac you may have seen also on lists. And it's, it's native up in the interior. It just should stay there. It's just leave it right where it's supposed to be. One of the things it'll do in your yard is take over and put runners up and be impossible to get out if you change your mind. And appearances can be deceiving. You know, the Himalayan blackberry, the lot of bees, the honey bees and bumble bees go to that. So when you see a thicket of blackberry flowers, usually you will see some bees there, but hardly any other pollinators. And yet Yaro, which is very humble and isn't really of much interest at all to honey bees or bumble bees. The bee lab at Simon Fraser has got it on their list as one of the most valuable plants for the many other kinds of native bees and non bee pollinators. And here's a funny looking little fly that is getting at Yaro flowers here. This fly actually is one that will lay an egg on another insect on a caterpillar, for example. So back to, you know, continuing on with what you could do, provide a safe water supply. If they don't eat leaves, they don't have water, but they need safe water. If there's no do around in the mornings, then a lot of insects can, their lives will be shorter and they'll lay less eggs. So, and, you know, just being dry conditions. Period is a severe stressor so provides safe water by making sure they can't drown them. Some of these insects are so tiny they get caught in the surface tension of the water and they cannot get out. Little tiny parasitic wasps, for example. So they need a safe beach. This person was having bees drowning in this water, this pool here. She thought she was, you know, feeding the animals in her garden water, but there was bees drowning because they couldn't get out of the slippery plastic. So we just put a piece of slate here. It's a nice little bee beach and the insects line up right along here. And if they fall in, they can easily drag themselves out. So it's like a bird bath, you know, you dump the water periodically so mosquitoes don't breed. And because bees and wasps will come and drink, it's better if it's up out of where pets or can drink out of it or little kids might be playing in it. You know, what else can we do? Well, don't use pesticides on anything. And that includes the herbicides and fungicides. There's lots of really effective ways to manage, prevent pests and diseases without having to resort to spraying something. And, you know, even the things that you think are the safest are not any safer to insects than the more toxic stuff. So, you know, people do think that the pesticides that organic growers are allowed to use must be safer somehow. Well, they're, you know, safer to us, but they're not safer to non-target insects. So if it can kill a pest, it can kill a butterfly, a parasitic wasp pollinator. So never spray routinely. One of my pet peeves is people routinely using dormant oil sprays on their fruit trees. Well, if you have some pests on your fruit trees for which dormant oil will work, and it's a limited range of things, but we do have pests that can be on a fruit tree. If they were there in the summer, then you schedule yourself a dormant spray in the winter. But otherwise, it's a real overuse of pesticides. There are other insects and beneficial mites that are overwintering in that bark, so you're killing them too. So, you know, know what the problem is, learn the life cycles, learn how to decide whether treatment is needed or not. You know, here's a little tiny caterpillar that makes very small webs on apple trees. This is not a tent caterpillar. These are not going to blow up into big tents with lots of foliage disappearing. So is this a problem for this apple tree? It's probably not. You probably don't even have to do anything about this. So, knowing what the problem is and are the numbers of something chewing on leaves high enough to affect the tree. Because remember how valuable those caterpillars are in the environment. And, you know, homemade sprays are not okay. If it's something that could kill or even repel a pest, it's going to also do the same thing to other insects. So it's just a spray alone will change the odor on the leaves, as I mentioned earlier. Like this little hover fly, there's aphids on this leaf here on the underside and she's laying her eggs right there. But she's not going to do that if you are messing around with some kitchen soap and things like that. The aphids will come back, but the predator didn't. And a lot of these homemade sprays can damage the plants themselves. You know, people put baking soda sprays and destroy their rose flowers. You know, if you keep using soap sprays on seedlings, the leaf cuticle is damaged. So there's a lot of things. This is not a solution. I guess that's all I'm going to say. Homemade sprays are not a solution. And, you know, don't use pesticides inadvertently. They're still neonicotinoids. They've been phased out and in some things they've been phased out, but you can still buy plants from US nurseries where the neonics are being used. If you know an organic supplier or a local grower that you can talk to about what they're doing when they're raising their plants, you know, patronize them and grow your own plants from seed. That's the only way to really, really ensure that you're not bringing in neonicotinoids, which lasts for a very long time in the plant and come up in the nectar. Use any kind of insect control correctly. I don't know what this person was trying to catch, but yellow sticky traps out in the environment catch all kinds of insects. And I'll bet you I'm sure those weren't all what that person was trying to catch, you know, in the past. There's a lot of creatures stuck there that would not be pests. So don't use them outdoors. Use sticky traps indoors. If you're using winter moth traps, the tree bands in the winter, you take it down in February. There's a lot of very beneficial insects that run up and down tree trunks use them as highways in the other parts of the year. And never ever use bug zappers. The old bug zappers, I remember early study showing that in two weeks, six bug zappers, these entomologists caught 14,000 insects and they teased them all apart and identified them and what 31 were mosquitoes. And people think that they're electrocuting mosquitoes when they hear them sizzle in the bug zapper. The new devices that are really being promoted heavily by hardware stores, it's a lovely little single easy unit here with LED, a cool white LED light in it. Cool white LED lights are extremely attractive to many kinds of insects. They're in the blue spectrum and that's where insects see. Very few insects see anything in the, you know, the redder spectrum of light. So these are just as lethal and they make just as little sense as the old bug zappers did. So turn off your outdoor lights or replace them. Don't leave nights, the lights on at night. If you've got sensor lights on they trip on the minute there's an emotion. Then that's what you want for security is you want a security light that lights right up when somebody's there and turns off again. The other thing you can do is just change the bulbs. I've done that with all my outdoor lights that are on sensor lights. Warm LEDs turn out to be really not attractive to insects at all. They're much better than any other kind of light you can buy and now you can get LEDs readily anywhere. Go for the warm spectrum ones and put those in your porch light and your light fixtures and turn off those silly little pathway lights that are on for no reason at all. Put on something that flips on and gives a really good view to somebody that needs the light when they're out there and then flips off again. Minimize cultivation in, you know, when you're gardening, a lot of beneficial insects, their pupae are in the surface layer of soil like just a centimeter below the surface or they might just be under under the mulch. And that's where they overwinter as well. So cultivating in the fall will kill a lot of them. And 70% of our native bees overwinter in burrows. They're not up in nests above the ground. They're not like honey bees or mason bees. They're in these little nests, little holes that they've drilled in the soil. So you don't want to cultivate over that. There's a lot of ground dwellers that we need to protect. You won't maybe see some of these unless you're out at night. But this is not an insect, it's a spider, but it only lives on the ground. It doesn't have, it doesn't run up on plants. It eats pill bugs. Wireworm predator. This is an extremely valuable little predator on wireworms. It is exactly the size and shape of a wireworm. It's just that it's white. If you see a white wireworm, well, that's, you don't, you definitely don't want to harm that one. And there are all kinds of ground beetles. And this is a baby ground beetle, a little larva. They need stable places. So if, you know, areas that are undisturbed and perennial beds between annual beds, we may have annual vegetables in some areas but have perennial flowers or perennial vegetables and others leave places on the margins for these insects to go. And again, minimizing cultivation. Somewhere to pupate is really important. If you're a caterpillar up a tree and you drop out of the tree and you hit pavement. Well, your life is over anyway. You know, it's not going to, you know, all of the leaves in the world feeding those caterpillars are not going to help if the moth can't survive. And this kind of thing is certainly better than nothing because the caterpillars can drop or climb down from the tree and get into the mulch. What would even be better is shrubs here. A clump of shrubbery that the insects would get in and under and the soil would be loose and it would be protected. So understory plants under our trees would actually, whether it was ferns or whatever, would actually be even more beneficial than having the mulch. But the mulch is way better than sod or far better than those poor street trees that are in concrete. And just rethinking our fall cleanup. Insects in this latitude start getting ready for winter. About the first week or two of September, some of them are going off to hibernate or diapause already. So over the period of the next month or so, they're finding their hideaway places for winter. And so you come along at the end of October and do a big garden cleanup and you end up killing or removing most of the creatures that you really would appreciate having next spring. So twig nesting bees get into the hollow twigs of things. Many insects have, for example, this is a butterfly chrysalis. They're attached to stalks and things in the environment. They just look like part of the twigs. So leave standing stems there until spring. If you really have to cut them down, leave them there and just leave them lying there gently. Now, don't chop them and shred them and compost them. And then do your finish, finish your cleanup in the spring. And that gives insects a time to overwinter and emerge and fly away. And this is one last thing. Considering, consider reducing the area of annual gardens and even vegetable gardens and lawns. Use that extra space to plant trees and restore native vegetation. You know, add flowers for pollinators, grow perennials that insects would appreciate. And I say this, even though I'm an avid vegetable gardener, I spend a considerable, you know, time teaching gardeners how to grow more food in a small space so that when we don't have to use all our spaces for lawns or even any kind of annual garden. But start moving to perennial native planting. This is the Nature's Best Hope that I mentioned. This is the Douglas Talamy book. Most libraries would have it. It's widely available. It is a very interesting read. This gardening with native plants is a fairly, is quite recent. There are other native plant guides around, of course, but this one's particularly good. And if you want to read more about the insect crisis just globally, this is one Oliver Millman did a very good book on that. So, just looking, yes, we are on time and we have half an hour or so for questions. All right, stop sharing at this point. Thank you so much for that. So, folks, if you have questions, just type them into the Q&A feature on your menu and I will read those questions out. You kind of touched on this Linda at the end of your presentation, but my question was exactly, but how do you balance gardening for food and having these, you know, robust native plant gardens that support the insect populations? Well, you just need, just garden really intensively in the area you've designated for your annual garden for food. And maybe start, you know, it's giving us some of that lawn space, you know, start, start replacing slowly, piece by piece, lawns and things that are not producing the food. So, I, you know, I try and grow as much food as possible and the smallest space as possible. And I mulch a lot and I disturb the soil as little as possible, even in my annual garden. Yeah. Okay. And I have a question about patio gardening. So, you know, if you, if you just have a balcony and you live in an apartment, you know, how much can you be doing and should you be doing to help support the insect populations? Well, it's really, you know, what would you like to do? I mean, you go to the highest priority things which would be something like a pollen nectar plants that bloom all season or the last half of the summer and into the fall. Those can be really vital. They fill an important gap in what's available out there. You know, and people, I do the butterfly, I lead the butterfly count on Salt Spring here and, you know, have a butterfly presentation and people are always wondering whether should they be planting nectar plants for the butterflies, or should they be concentrating on the native plants the caterpillars need. That's where you are. If you're in an area where there's native vegetation around in parks or wild areas or you're maybe out more in the rural area, in our wooded areas, and there's food for caterpillars, then the most valuable thing is nectar plants for the adults. But if you're living in an area where there's almost no vegetation for the caterpillars to eat, there's probably plenty of nectar plants because people have, you know, landscapes and gardens, then it might be more valuable to plant native plants that are eaten by the caterpillars. So it depends what's going on around you. Makes sense. And here's a question about, you know, depending how high you live. So if you're on like the 15th, 20th floor of an apartment, does that change, you know, what kind of insect populations you're going to be able to attract and support? Oh yeah, it makes a huge difference. Some species don't fly very far above the ground or even mosquitoes only go up to the second or third floor usually. Okay. Yeah, it's going to really depend for sure. Okay. And you talked about how you've got all sorts of critters, you know, living in the soil and overwintering in the soil. When you add, you know, all of your leaf litter and your compost and then a whole new layer of topsoil in the spring, does that, you know, affect them at all? They can still climb out? No, not at all. There wouldn't be any reason to add topsoil in the spring if you've got soil. Yeah. And then that's a good point because I actually don't want little bees making nests in my vegetable garden. So thick mulch prevents that. And I have the photo I showed you, there was some rockery there and there was a bee nest. That's actually at the base of a rock wall, which I keep intentionally all cleared out of mulch. And there's lots of like really good places to go and be a bee and make a nest. But I don't want them in the garden because I've tried marking their little holes and with a tag and it always ends in disaster. But yeah, if you put mulch on top of that, they probably won't get out. And if you put soil on top of that, they for sure won't get out. Right here is a question. With the increased fire risk in our province, Fire Smart BC is recommending not using bark mulch or wood chips on your property as fire embers ignite these products very rapidly. Fire retardant undergrowth may be a better choice. How do you feel about this? Oh yeah, absolutely. Do not use bark mulch. Now wood chips, if it's two chips, wood chips, that's fine. That's not flammable. Those bark mulches, the ornamental bark mulches, boy, it'll make your hair stand on and seeing those videos of flames just shooting down a path to a house. So do not use that stuff. Leaf mulches, wood chips like the big chips, any other kind of organic material is not particularly flammable. I was quite surprised to learn from our local Fire Smart guys that even they are buta sleeves, which I thought I assumed would be quite flammable in the summer when they really start to pile up. They said they couldn't catch them on fire no matter what they did. But they're really worried about bark mulch. So be careful. There's lots of other organic material. There's lawn clippings. There's waste stuff from your garden crops. There's leaves from last fall. It's all soggy. All of those things are not flammable. So definitely mulch, just stay away from bark mulch. Good to know. Anyone has any other questions? Again, you can pop them in the Q&A or in the chat. So we at the library have a mason bee hotel in our garden, which is thriving with life at the moment. But we also have a mason bee lending program. So if you have a small garden, even a balcony and you're interested in participating in our mason bee lending program, reach out to us at the library. You get all the information that you could possibly need and you get a little bee hotel for a year and you get some cocoons to get yourself started. And then if you want to carry on beyond the year and you get lots of support through the whole process and if you want to carry on beyond the year, we get bee houses that are made by the West Vancouver Senior Center, which is really fantastic. So I have a house at my kid's school and it's thriving as well and it's really, really fun and the kids love it. It's great for kids because they don't, you know, they're really harmless bees and they don't sting, so it's great to have around schools. All right. Well, if there are no more questions, Linda, this was absolutely fascinating. I certainly learned a lot. I mean, I just love insects anyway, but I love them even a little bit more. I also appreciate that you pointed out a positive thing about mosquitoes because I think that's the one insect that we all have trouble finding anything good about. Yeah, it's a key dietary item for bats and swallows and lots of birds. Yeah, I'll try and keep that in mind when I'm cursing them over the summer. Well, thank you so much and I hope everyone has a wonderful evening. Thank you. Good night, Linda. Good night all.