Author: pbpp

1. A single bat can eat 600 bugs in one night. That would be like a human eating 20 pizzas in one night.

2. 95% of natural rain forest restoration is done by bats eating seeds from fruit and then being fertilized by the bats guano.

3. The vampire bat is the only bat in the world whose entire diet is blood.

4. The bumblebee bat is the smallest bat in the world, (also the cutest).

5. Aesop wrote a story about a bat who borrowed money to start a business.

The butterflies come from caterpillars.

They fly and spread love ❤️ over the garden.

They help make more plants, flowers, and trees.

They bring lots of colors to spring!

I love spring! ❤️

Within the avian world, one of the best pollinators is the tiny hummingbird.  Found only in North and South America, there are 360 different species of hummingbirds.  These amazing birds range in size from the smallest bird in the world, the Bumblebee Hummingbird which only reaches about 2.4 inches, to the Giant Hummingbird which can be as long as 9 inches.

Every single hummingbird is a pollinator, meaning they take pollen from one plant to another effectively fertilizing the plant and allowing it to produce seeds.  Much of a hummingbird’s diet consists of nectar that it sips from flowers, and also small fruit flies that it catches.  When a hummingbird sticks its bill into a flower to drink the nectar, pollen from the flower can stick to its head and bill.  The pollen is then be brushed off of the hummingbird when it feeds on another flower, creating pollination. 

When pollen gets spread around, plants produce more seeds, are healthier and even create fruit.  Planting brightly colored flowers like Trumpet Vine, Bee Balm, Sage, Lupine, Lilies, and more can help hummingbirds get the food they need to stay healthy and also help them spread pollen. Hummingbirds burn so many calories while beating their wings at 70 times per second that they need to eat about every 10 minutes.  And when a hummingbird is hungry it can visit anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 flowers every day.

Water can be a pollinator. It is known as hydrophily.

There are two ways that water can pollinate.

1.       Surface pollination. A plant will distribute pollen on the surface, where the pollen will drift down stream to another plant. A good example of this is the vallisneria spiralis, or Tape grass, whose female plants temporarily reach up to the surface to make sure that it gets pollinated.

2.       Submerged pollination. The plant will release pollen that is heavier than the water around it. After it is released, the pollen finds its way to a second plant. A plant that does this is the Najas guadalupensis, or southern water nymph, whose male plants release pollen grains that drift through the water. The pollen grains are then caught by a female plant.