Counting Pollinators

Plants don’t produce flowers for our benefit, they are there to make seeds and continue the species.

As the daylight hours extend and temperatures rise, flowers are appearing in the hope of being pollinated, but there are signs that pollinators are in trouble and national conservation organisations are asking citizen scientists to help gather information about how many insects are about.

Many of you know about the Big Butterfly Count in late July, but there is a wider scheme that runs all summer, the Pollinator Monitoring Scheme Flower-Insect Timed Counts, that’s a bit of a mouthful so it is abbreviated to PoMS FIT Counts and it is a lot simpler than it sounds. You settle yourself to watch a bunch of flowers in the garden, a park or out in a field for ten minutes and count how many insects land on the flowers in the time.

You can just count the insects, but it is better if you can say what type, not species just titles such as beetle, bee, wasp or fly. When many people think about pollinators, they think of bees and they are important, but many if not most insect pollination is done by beetles, wasps and flies.

There is a very helpful app if you are not sure of the differences. To make it easier, the very small insects are all lumped together as just that, small insects.

The people who run the PoMS project, the UK Centre for Hydrology and Ecology, also ask to know which flowers you are observing. This can guide which plants may be best to encourage or plant if you are trying to support a particular insect population that is struggling in your area.

PoMS has been coordinating FIT Counts since 2017 and each year’s data provides fresh insights on insect flower relationships and how things are changing. As they say in their 2023 report, ‘PoMS is already making an impact on both policy and research agendas, at UK level and beyond.’ Several members of the PoMS partnership were expert witnesses for the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee (SITC) inquiry into insect decline and UK food security last year.

It is particularly helpful to the project if you can visit your site several times over the summer and into the autumn, or visit different sites with different flowers. The more counts that are made, the more powerful the data collected.

It might surprise you to learn that the plant with the highest average FIT Count is Ivy. This late flowering species has nectar rich flowers that are a boon to insects gathering food stores ready for hibernation when few other flowers are around. The most popular summer flower with insects is Hogweed with its large, bright white plates of flowers which attract many flies. Bramble is one of the favourite flowers of Honeybees and Bumblebees but so is Lavender if you have it in the garden. The much maligned Ragwort is an important source of food for Hoverflies which in turn are as important as Honeybees for pollinating crops.

It is so easy to carry out a FIT Count. You need a warm preferably sunny day which is when insects are likely to be flying and feeding, coincidentally a nice day to be outside. The project provides a list of the common flowers most likely to attract insects. You choose a site and focus in on a patch that would fit in a 50cm square. You count any insects that are already on the flowers and any that actually land on the flowers in the ten minutes. Then send the results via the app or back home from a computer. Full details and helpful information is available from the website https://ukpoms.org.uk/fit-counts.

Ed Dolphin