INDIANAPOLIS — Saving the planet’s pollinators isn’t easy.
Just ask bee expert Katheen Prough, chief apiary inspector for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.
Answering a call that’s not so unusual, Prough a few weeks back headed to the main post office in Indianapolis, where a box of live bees shipped to an Indiana beekeeper had accidentally burst open.
Prough calmed both the swarm and alarmed postal workers before corralling the bees into a container.
“I had to tell them, ‘You could do more harm to those bees than they could to do you,’” she said.
That’s a theme she’ll be repeating in months to come as Indiana puts together a statewide pollinator protection plan.
From expanding habitat to potentially curbing the use of pesticides, its recommendations will aim to mitigate harm already done to the winged creatures that Prough and other experts say are vital to the American food supply.
In early June, the Indiana State Department of Agriculture pulled together a range of people with interest in the future of honeybees and their fellow pollinators, the monarch butterfly. Both bees and butterflies are on decline, which is a worrisome sign given their key role in pollinating fruit, vegetables and seed crops.
Meg Leader, a department program manager, cites estimates that put pollinators’ economic value at about $15 billion a year nationally.
“In the past two decades, we’ve seen a big die-off,” she said. “We need to reverse that trend.”
It’s not easy given the nature of the problem. The loss of pollinators is linked to a combination of factors including exposure to common pesticides and resilient parasites, exacerbated by poor nutrition due to the loss of floral food sources.
“The complexity of it makes it all the harder to solve,” said Purdue University pesticide researcher David Scott, who’s working with state officials on the pollinator plan.
Over the past five years, the yearly loss of honeybee colonies over the winters have averaged about 30 percent nationally.
Indiana’s numbers are worse: The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Informed Partnership found Indiana beekeepers lost 51 percent of their bees this past winter. The year before, it was closer to 65 percent.
“The losses have been devastating,” said Aaron Werner, a high school biology teacher and commercial beekeeper in Terre Haute.
Indiana, like other states, is coming with up a long-term pollinator plan in response to a call from the White House.
In May, a task force released the National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and other Pollinators, which calls on states to help reach broad goals.
Those include reducing honeybee colony losses to no more than 15 percent a year within a decade. The national plan also calls for increasing the Eastern population of the monarch butterfly within five years so that 225 million butterflies occupy roughly 15 acres of wintering grounds in Mexico.
In Indiana, that habitat expansion means an increase of about 70,000 acres of native wildflowers, said Phil Marshall, the state’s chief entomologist.
“That’s a huge increase,” he said.
State officials are looking at ways to expand that foraging habitat. They likely will include planting more native wildflowers along roadways and in state parks.
But Prough and Marshall say it will also mean asking landowners to cultivate more pollinator-friendly plants. It may take 100,000 Hoosiers putting wildflowers on their property to attain the goal, they estimate.
“Anyone can help. Just get rid of grass in your backyard and put some flowers in,” said Prough.
But also be ready for what will come.
“If you don’t want to attract bees to your backyard, then don’t plant bee-friendly plants," she said.