by Carla Caruso

Protecting biodiversity in your Park Lands means more than just protecting the large trees or easy-to-spot creatures, such as bats and possums.

Your Park Lands are also home to many understorey plants, including unusual grasses and rare wildflowers.

Parts of your Park Lands - the parts with restored native vegetation - also provide small but vitally important ecosystems for wildlife including birds, skinks, ants, and other insects.

Pollination ecologist and educator Bianca Amato wants to put the spotlight on bees.

*Adelaide pollination ecologist and educator Bianca Amato ‘in the field’. According to Bianca, native bees are more efficient pollinators than honeybees and could help pollinate agricultural crops.*

Bianca is behind the Adelaide Pollination Project, promoting pollination education and ecology in South Australia.

“Often in conservation, we think of trees and birds and koalas and cute things that we can look at, but the base of the ecosystem are insects,” Bianca says.

“Those small creatures can hold the ecosystem together and we don’t really think about them. They’re not very charismatic and everyone’s scared of them.

“But without pollinators like bees, the plants won’t be able to reproduce as effectively. And when they do reproduce, the next generation of plants won’t be as genetically diverse and will be more susceptible to diseases and pests.

“When we think of biodiversity, we want a healthy ecosystem that can manage itself. Each part of the ecosystem has a function. And if we start to remove certain plants – if we remove pollinators – the system begins to break down.”

A big problem for native bees, which are largely solitary unlike honeybees, is bare ground constantly being landscaped over.

*This blue banded bee was captured on camera in Adelaide Botanic Garden (Park 11) by Fran Mussared.*

“We have 400 native bee species in South Australia – 30 per cent live in cavities in trees or deadwood,” Bianca says.

“And then, 70 per cent live in the ground in little boroughs, kind of like an ant’s hole. Often we think we need to grass over everything or put down pavers or footpaths. But when we do have a little bit of bare ground, that’s potentially a bee habitat.”

The environmental sciences PhD student runs community workshops on pollination and likes to keep her style of education fun. This includes recently comparing actor Pedro Pascal’s fashion with that of different bees on her Instagram page.

As she says: “We need to care about science and nature, and we don’t do that by reading academic journals. We do that through fun videos and touching things and going outside and connecting with nature.”

*Bianca recently enjoyed comparing actor Pedro Pascal’s appearance with various bees on her Instagram page. Photo: Adelaide Pollination Project.*

Bianca has more tips for keeping native bees happy in your Park Lands, as follows:

Bee hotels – or artificial nesting sites – like the one found in G.S. Kingston Park / Wirrarninthi (Park 23), are great for those native bees that nest in cavities. The hubs provide a space for shelter and rest, with such bees not being part of a hive.
Also beneficial is having “a large suite of flowers” on offer. “Our bees have evolved with different body shapes to be able to pollinate different flowers,” Bianca says.
“Some of our bees have really long tongues, so that they can reach the end of a tube flower – like our blue banded bees. Then we have other bees, with really short tongues and short little heads, and they prefer things like eucalypt flowers or spring daisies.
“We don’t have to plant the bush, but we can replicate some of the flower shapes and colours that were there before for these different preferences.”
Colour-wise, Bianca says: “We normally say that bees like yellow and blue flowers. They can see a different spectrum of light than us and they can also see ultraviolet. So, some flowers will also be emitting an ultraviolet colour that we can’t see, but they can.”
Creating “connecting patches” of flora is vital too. “If you think of a honeybee that lives in a hive, it’s really robust and big and strong and has the warmth of the colony,” Bianca says.
“They can fly up to 5km for food. Whereas our solitary native ones can sometimes only fly up to 500m.
“So, if you have these little patches of bush, or patches of linear vegetation on the side of a road, a lot of them can’t even leave that because it’s like an island.
“We often think about creating ‘connecting patches’, so they can almost leap from one to another. There’s only a certain amount of resources in each patch.”

With insect populations overall declining globally, Bianca says every bit we can do helps. “There are very few people in Australia trying to work out what’s happening with our native bees. But they are underfunded [an area] and we have a lot still to learn. We know very little about our native bees.”

The buzz on native bees

Read more about threats to biodiversity in your Park Lands: