This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

At up every golf course, athletic field, industrial park, and yard in the U.S.

And you have an area nearly the size of Florida. Upon first glance all that lawn might seem a biological

wasteland, a monoculture of grass. But while natural areas in the U.S. continued to decrease

thanks to urbanization, urban green spaces, including lawns, could become more

important reservoirs of biodiversity.

What happens if we mow our lawns last? more important reservoirs of biodiversity.

What happens if we mow our lawns less do we get more lawnflowers and if we get more lawnflowers can we get more bees?

U.S. Forest Service Ecologist Susanna B. Lerman.

She and her colleagues devise an experiment to see if front lawns could, in theory, provide decent

habitat for bees, and if so, how to do it.

So they recruited 16 homeowners from a Massachusetts suburb and monitored for flowers and bees

throughout the summer for two years.

Each of the homeowners agreed not to use any kind of pesticide or herbicide, and none had cultivated any sort of pollinator or vegetable garden that could skew the results. Some of the lawns were mowed weekly, some every other week,

and others were mowed every three weeks.

When we mowed the lawns less, we got more flowers,

so roughly two and a half times more.

But it was the yards that got mowed every two weeks that actually had the most bees.

No surprise, flowers were most abundant on the lawns mowed least often.

But why do bees like a bit more frequent mowing?

Lerman thinks it's because most of the bees she found were tiny native sweat bees, roughly

the size of a grain of rice. Critters that small could find it difficult to navigate through taller grasses.

...