Lawns across Minnesota will become a little more colorful and wild this spring after several thousand residents applied for state funding to plant wildflowers, shrubs and other prime bumblebee habitat in their yards. The state’s Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR) will select the first 500 or so homeowners this week to receive funding under the trial program, which will pay residents up to $350 to plant pollinator gardens or.

Some people have mowed their lawns five times or more this season. Tara Witherow hasn’t mowed hers once. And she doesn’t plan to. Witherow is anti-lawn. She looks up and down her Davenport street at the nicely shorn rectangles of bright green in front of the homes and she sees “wasted space.” See full article here.

WASHINGTON — When researchers collected honey samples from around the world, they found that three-quarters of them had a common type of pesticide suspected of playing a role in the decline of bees. Even honey from the island paradise of Tahiti had the chemical. That demonstrates how pervasive a problem the much-debated pesticide is for honeybees, said authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. They said it.

NEW ULM — A little over a year after being sown, the New Ulm Pollinator Park is going strong but has some room for improvement. To help out, volunteers joined Regional Ecologist Megan Benage with the Department of Natural Resources to weed out some invasive grasses Saturday, July 15. “Basically (the park) all came to be really through the efforts of Deb Steinberg, who is a local citizen,” Benage said..

Never underestimate the power of the bee brain. In the latest triumph for one of humanity’s favorite insects, bumblebees learned how to push a ball to the center of a platform for a sugary treat. That may not make them a threat on the chess board, but soccer or even Skee-Ball might be within their intellectual grasp — if it were scaled down in size, of course. The new research.

Donald Trump has been accused of targeting Muslims, media outlets and even department stores in his first month in the White House. Now, the US president may have doomed a threatened bumblebee. An executive order freezing new regulations could push the rusty patched bumblebee towards extinction, environmental groups claim. The 60-day pause on all federal regulations that have yet to be implemented – which includes the bumblebee protection – will.

The Obama administration, rushing to secure its environmental legacy, has increased protection for a humble bumblebee. The rusty-patched bumblebee, once common across the continental United States, has been designated an endangered species by the Fish and Wildlife Service: the country’s first bumblebee, and the first bee from the lower 48 states, to be added to the register. Seven bees were previously listed as endangered, but they are found only in.

WASHINGTON — General Mills, the Xerces Society, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announce a major milestone in their partnership to restore and protect pollinator habitat across hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland in North America. The five-year, $4 million financial commitment between General Mills and USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) will support farmers across the U.S. by providing technical assistance to plant and protect pollinator habitat, such.

Honey bee colonies in the United States have been dying at high rates for over a decade, and agricultural pesticides — including fungicides, herbicides and insecticides — are often implicated as major culprits. Until now, most scientific studies have looked at pesticides one at a time, rather than investigating the effects of multiple real-world pesticide exposures within a colony. A new study is the first to systematically assess multiple pesticides.

Gov. Mark Dayton issued broad new guidelines Friday designed to restrict the use of a controversial pesticide that has been implicated in the decline of honeybees and other pollinators. Standing in the Agriculture-Horticulture building at the State Fair, next door to an exhibit hall filled with live bees and honey jars, the governor said his executive order would make Minnesota a leader in protecting pollinators. “We can show the nation.

We launched the Monarch Mania website in February to provide information and education on helping pollinators and creating gardens for them. Our goal was to register 50 gardens in our first year, and we surpassed that goal with 54. Registered gardeners were provided with a certificate and an attractive Monarch Mania sign to post in their garden. Funding was provided to the following area schools to create pollinator gardens: Mason.

Depleted monarch butterflies and honeybees could get a boost from Iowa farmers over the next few years, thanks in part to lower commodity prices that have prompted landowners to shift more than 100,000 acres of row crops into habitat for creatures vital to pollination. Over the past four years, Iowa farmers have enrolled 127,005 acres in a federal conservation reserve program designed to sustain butterflies, bees, wasps, birds and bats.