The bees are different in cities: A study of bee diversity in a local urban butterfly-family-loved city

When the Town Mouse visited the Country Mouse, the old fable goes, she politely ate her host’s simple food. But when the pair ventured to the city for the delights of urban life, the Country Mouse quickly fled back home to escape cats and other dangers. The country is simple, but at least it is not dangerous, the rodents thought.

Try telling that to the bees. For these pollinators, that urban-rural dynamic has in many ways flipped: With the spread of industrialized agriculture, monocrops like wheat and corn have replaced forests of diverse flowering plants, obliterating bees’ food source. Pesticides are killing bees in huge numbers because of agriculture. But oddly enough, urban gardens—where different crops can grow next to each other, since they’re tended by hand rather than by giant, lumbering machines—are increasingly providing bees with sustenance. A growing body of research is showing that bee diversity in cities can actually be much larger than in surrounding rural areas.

There is a group of scientists that are working to monitor bees and other pollination issues in the city. They’re working in over 250 community gardens and monitoring bee behavior. Plants respond to healthy populations of pollinator, particularly the native types. A bee scientist is showing visitors how to use a device to catch bees by pointing at flowers. “My team is essentially setting up a bee surveillance state,” says Dunlap. Who is visiting and what they are doing on the flowers are some of the things we are watching.

The scientists are interested in bees. “We are the most bee-diverse city of any city anywhere in the world so far that’s been surveyed,” says Ed Spevak, director of the Saint Louis Zoo WildCare Institute Center for Native Pollinator Conservation. “It’s all about biodiversity, whether we’re looking at the biodiversity of bees for best crop production or biodiversity of habitat to support the biodiversity of bees.”

Life is flourishing outside every front door. The air is filled with things that grow in it. A cow’s weight under a half acres of soil is caused by a bacterium. Studies in North Carolina and Pennsylvania have turned up hundreds of millions of insects per acre on samples five inches deep. The larger fauna might be more visible, but they still stay out of sight to the homeowners that host them: bobcats in Dallas, bears in Aspen, and coyotes as far north as Alaska. Since the invention of the lawn, caretakers have been doing little to help this species, as long as they aren’t working against it.

By “lawn” here, I mean a monoculture of grass cut less than two inches high, kept green with staggering resources and force of will. This landscaping choice began with the British gentry and then spread by mass ads that convinced Americans that having the leisure and money to keep a uniformly green yard was something to aspire to.

In recent years, the lawn has been losing its grip on the American psyche, especially in areas where rivers are drying up and water bills are rising. For many years, the city of Las Vegas has been paying people to rip up their lawns and replace them with more regionally appropriate plants, and last year the state of Nevada started banning lawns outright. Water agencies around the Colorado River have taken pledges to stop pouring their gallons into decorative grass. The Million Pollinator Garden Challenge registered more than one million spaces in 2019.

Replacing a life-suckling, arbitrary landscaping option with a more sustainable and bustling garden might seem like an obvious victory for homeowners, wildlife and city governments. But there’s another organization that budding environmentalists might forget to consult: an unpaid pseudo-government of neighbors, otherwise known as homeowners associations.

Homeowners associations began in the early 20th century and gained power from the 1960s onward as local governments lost tax revenue and loosened zoning restrictions. Paula A.Franzese, a law professor, said that developers stepped in to provide services that would normally be the responsibility of the city. Volunteers, hired contractors, and management companies are the ones who inherit the responsibility when the people that build the homes sell them off.

This almost-government can create rules that our legal system will sometimes enforce, but they are usually not beholden to the constitution. For example: No city, state, or federal law can prevent you from putting a political sign in your yard, because that’s protected by the constitution as free speech. Gerald Korngold is a professor of law and director of real estate studies at New York Law School. “It is a private government,” he says. “But it’s a private government operating simply based on the rules that they have agreed to,” though the courts can decide that some homeowners association covenants are unenforceable by the legal system.

Urban-versus-rural rivalry in the new era of urbanization: how big farms can grow, clean up the landscape, and even reduce temperatures during heat waves?

People have long stoked an urban-versus-rural rivalry, with vastly different cultures and surroundings. There is a movement that is bringing more of the country into the city. Rurbanization promises to provide more locally grown food, clean up the built environment and even reduce temperatures during heat waves.

It’s reversing the thought that growing food is bad for biodiversity because clearing land for agriculture entails removing native plants and animals. The idea was based on observations of rural agriculture that show how big farms can be if they grow too many crops. But that doesn’t hold for the urban farms, gardens, and even smaller green spaces.