Welcome back my friends to the EpicGuarding Podcast. We are here again with David,

Mrs. Juski, a naturalist, and he's with the National Wildlife Federation. We talked

yesterday about native plants. We're going to expand that conversation a bit with David

and talk about bees and pollinators. Obviously a topic, David, we've talked about a million

times here on the show, but every lens is different. Every lens helps us round our knowledge

out. And so from a naturalist perspective, or maybe even from the NWF's perspective,

are there really good ways to help them and then are there like terrible ways that everyone

thinks are good?

Yeah, so let's start with defining what a pollinator is because even that sometimes is

confusing to people. So pollinators are animals that visit flowers to get a food or

reward, usually nectar, but in some cases pollen. And when they're doing that, they get

dusted with that pollen and they actually pollinate or fertilize the flowers of that

plant, which is how flowering plants are able to reproduce. When they're pollinated, they

can form the seeds that kind of form the next generation of the plant. And then those

plants go on to package those seeds in things like fruits and berries and nuts and things

like that, which become a food source for a whole other group of wildlife. And so pollinators

are pretty critically important. Flowering plants evolved a long time ago when the dinosaurs

were still around, I think in the Jurassic period and pollinators kind of evolved alongside

them. And today, the majority of our plants are flowering plants and the majority of those

are pollinated by these pollinating animals. So a pollinator is at one kind of animal.

It's this group of different species. And so today pollinators are things like bees,

swas, flies, beetles, other insects, but also things like hummingbirds, things like certain

...