Pollinator Giving Trees – a fun hands-on project to learn about pollinators

The number of monarch butterflies that completed an annual migration to their winter home in a Mexican forest sank this…

In a new study, Monarch Watch Director Chip Taylor and colleagues have shown that speculation regarding the declining monarch population, despite having received much attention, is unsupported.

We know monarch numbers have declined drastically in recent years. Estimates are down by 80 to 90% from a population size of about one billion in the early 1990s.

It’s long been thought that the big reason behind this is the loss of milkweed throughout the farming regions of the U.S. Midwest.

Right now in Washington and Oregon, 380,000 honeybee hives are at work pollinating cherry, pear, and apple orchards.

Last month, a million hives—three-quarters of the nation’s entire stock of commercial honeybees—were pollinating almonds in the Central Valley of California.

This last year, tens of thousands of children across the Midwest watched IMAX film Flight of the Butterflies on the…

Flowers, bugs and bees: Stephen Buchmann wanted to study them all when he was a kid. “I never grew out of my bug-and-dinosaur phase,” he tells NPR’s Arun Rath. “You know, since about the third grade, I decided I wanted to chase insects, especially bees.”

These days, he’s living that dream. As a pollination ecologist, he’s now taking a particular interest in how flowers attract insects. In his new book, The Reason for Flowers, he looks at more than just the biology of flowers — he dives into the ways they’ve laid down roots in human history and culture, too.

Every year, monarch butterflies undertake what seems like an impossible journey.

By the millions, they leave their summer breeding grounds in the United States and Canada to fly thousands of miles to a small area of alpine forest in central Mexico.

Since the onset of spring, one kind of game-changing news after another has reached Iowa farmers. These announcements will affect the third of the state’s farmers who are struggling to control superweeds by using glyphosates and other herbicides.

New research revelations, government policy changes and farmers’ own dissatisfactions could radically alter both weed and pollinator management in the Midwest.

Monarch butterflies, which pollinate many different kinds of wildflowers, are among nature’s great wonders. Their annual migration is one of the most awe-inspiring on Earth: Each fall, millions of these striking black-and-orange butterflies take flight on a 3,000-mile journey across the U.S. and Canada to wintering grounds in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains.

The monarch population, which is determined by measuring the number of hectares the butterflies occupy in their Mexico habitat, has declined to 2.48 hectares—almost 30 percent less than last year’s population.

U.S. regulators will put new restrictions on the world’s most widely used herbicide to help address the rapid expansion of weeds resistant to the chemical, Reuters has learned.

The Environmental Protection Agency confirmed it will require a weed resistance management plan for glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s immensely popular Roundup weed-killer.

The migratory monarch butterfly population has been decimated in recent years, with a total population decline of 90 percent over the past two decades.

But the dying butterflies are a bellweather for even bigger environmental damage.

Oil! Our secret god, our secret sharer, our magic wand, fulfiller of our every desire, our co-conspirator, the sine qua non in all we do! Can’t live with it, can’t — right at this moment — live without it. But it’s on everyone’s mind.

Back in 2009, as fracking and the mining of the oil/tar sands in Alberta ramped up — when people were talking about Peak Oil and the dangers of the supply giving out — I wrote a piece for the German newspaper Die Zeit. In English it was called “The Future Without Oil.”

Two environmental groups filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today over its failure to protect the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act.

The Center for Biological Diversity and Center for Food Safety petitioned for the monarch’s protection in August 2014, following a more than 80 percent decline in the butterfly’s population over the past two decades. In December 2014 the agency issued an initial positive decision on the petition and launched an official review of the butterfly’s status.

Off the southern coast of California, just across the border from Tijuana, Mexico, dolphins swim around the fence that juts out into the Pacific Ocean. “They don’t really care,” said Jeff Crooks, a University of San Diego scientist who has been doing research along the U.S.-Mexico border for the past 16 years.

The border fence here was built long before President Trump’s campaign promises to “build a wall.”

For the first time in North American history, the numbers of bees, bats, butterflies, hummingbirds and other pollinators have fallen so low that there is scientific concern and public fear of a “pollinator collapse.”

Such a “food chain collapse” might not only affect the health of wild species in our parks and refuges, but also our food security derived from agricultural landscapes.