Caring for God’s Earth – Helping our Beleaguered Pollinators

Eco Church

Thank you to everyone who completed a lifestyle audit as part of our work towards becoming an Eco Church. Thanks to you, St Mary’s received its Bronze Eco Church Award at the end of March and the PCC has already agreed to start working towards the Silver Award! This time we will need to maintain what we are already doing, as well as improving our green credentials in four of the five categories: buildings; land; global & community engagement and lifestyle. The challenges are not insurmountable: we can do this, so please look out for information in these notes of things that you can do to help take this forward.

Helping our beleaguered pollinators

Due to the widespread use of insecticides, ploughing of old meadows and the tidying up of ‘weedy’ spaces, the number of insects in Britain has crashed in recent years. It is estimated that the total number of insects has declined by 75% in the last 50 years, so there are now only a quarter the number there were in the 1970s! Many of these insects are pollinators. Not only do plants need pollinators to ensure they set seed, but we humans need them too, so that our crops can bear fruit and provide us with food.

Could you make space in your garden for a wild flower plot or even just leave a small area to ‘go wild’ for the benefit of the honey bees, bumblebees; solitary bees; flies; butterflies; moths; hoverflies and even beetles which act as pollinators? Doing so would also attract the pollinators’ predators, so you would, in one simple step, have set up a food web which would draw other species into your garden, increasing its biodiversity and hopefully your own enjoyment of the wildlife around you. RMR

Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay