Pollinators hard at work!
Category: Bees, Butterflies, Culture, Ecology, Flies, Forests, Moths, Pollination | Date: Nov 17 2009 | By: dududiaries
Pollinators hard at work!
“One in three bites of food can be attributed to a pollinator”. This statement is often quoted by biologists around the world when talking about pollinators and their importance to our lives.
In Africa pollinators are primarily wild insects that travel between farms and natural habitat, and are extremely vulnerable to habitat loss and destruction.
Pollinators intimately link wild species with basic human livelihoods. The relationships between insects and flowers are at once ancient, beautifully intricate and correspondingly fragile.
These intricate and essential links between wild species, natural areas and food production were beautifully evident on a recent visit I paid to a farmer in Western Kenya. Lucy Murira grows a wide range of vegetables and fruits for her family. Her farm is located in the Nandi Hills nestled between tea plantations and forest patches. It is these forest patches that provide the pollinators for Lucy’s crops. Below is a short video showing some of the crops and pollinators on Lucy’s farm. (Please forgive the sloppiness of this video - it is my first attempt at doing this!)
As mentioned in the video, one of the important and nutritious crops growing on this farm is ‘Njahe’ a local variety of blackbean. It is a verdant climber with lovely pinky-lilac flowers.
The main pollinators of the blackbean here appear to be wild bees, including these lovely, robust and fast-flying carpenter bees.
Without the pollinating visits of these hardworking bees, there would be no pods to harvest.
One of the other crops growing here that benefits from pollination is the butterbean. As Lucy says, these are really yummy (in fact one of my favourites!). Skipper butterflies and bees were pollinating the butterbeans on this farm. All of them need the patches of forest to survive.
Pollinators need a clean, safe and pesticide-free environment to survive. Lucy’s farm is filled with a huge number of different pollinating insects. Not only were pollinating insects thriving on the farm, we even found this little reed frog dozing among the tendrils of the butterbeans!
More from the wonderful world of bugs soon!
Tags: Bees, Butterflies, dino j. martins, food security, indigenous vegetables, Kenya, pollinators
More pollinator diversity…
Category: Bees, Butterflies, Culture, Ecology, Flies, Forests, Hoverfly, Moths, Orchid, Pollination | Date: Jul 15 2009 | By: dududiaries
Paradise flycatcher!
Category: Ecology, Moths | Date: Mar 25 2009 | By: dududiaries
Hello - this morning I discovered a pair of mating hawkmoths sheltering on leaf in the garden. Just as I was photographing them, the female lifted the male, who is attached to her, into the air. As she flew clumsily (I guess he was rather heavy), I waited for them to land again so that I could continue photographing them. 
Suddenly a flash of angry red cut through the air. It seized the pair of moths and settled in a bush. Stunned, I moved forward to see what it was - a Paradise Flycatcher - one of the most voracious and beautiful birds in Kenya. The flycatcher seized the moths and gulped down the male first. The female managed to break free… 
But not for long… 
The bird pursued her swiftly up into the trees, grabbed her and then after beating her against a branch to remove some of the hairs covering her fat body, gulped her down whole! 
More hawkmoths…
Category: Moths, Orchid, Pollination | Date: Nov 10 2008 | By: dududiaries
Hello - sorry for not posting more often (again!). In response to the question about the moth’s tongues - they can be very long up to 12″ or even more! There are mainly two groups of hawkmoths - those with medium-length tongues and those with super-long tongues… Here you can see examples of both a short-tongued and long-tongued moth. More soon… 
Hawkmoths…
Category: Moths, Pollination | Date: Nov 02 2008 | By: dududiaries
Hello - sorry for not posting more often. Have mid-term exams coming up this week! I’ve been wanting to run a series about pollinators. This is the first of them. Pollinators, many of them insects, are one of the most under-appreciated groups of useful creatures in the world. Like the dung beetles they are toiling daily for us, but we mostly overlook them. To start off, here are just a few pictures of some gorgeous insect pollinators - hawmoths. These remarkable insects are fast-flying creatures that hover between flowers feeding on nectar with their long tongues (the proboscis) which can be coiled and uncoiled like a muscular spring. And as you enjoy them, please keep in mind this “One in three bites of food is thanks to a pollinator…”
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