They're more than just birds and bees: Meet the pollinators

In your garden lurk life forms carrying out a covert mission with far-reaching implications for the planet. Some work under cover of night, some at dawn and dusk, some in broad daylight. They are efficient, determined, and single-minded in their pursuits.

These animals are pollinators. Collectively, pollinators are an extremely diverse group of animals, comprising butterflies and bees, hummingbirds and bats, slugs and salamanders, and a slew of other creatures. As different as they may be, pollinators have one thing in common: they transport pollen from a male plant to a female plant. This results in the female producing a fruit. The fruit, when dispersed by animal, wind, or water, then grows into a new plant. A new plant means food in the form of plant sugars. And the production of plant sugars is the foundation of life on earth.

If this fact does little more than inspire a yawn, consider your most recent trip to the grocery store. Without pollinators, most of the shelves would be empty. You would not have your morning coffee, an apple at lunch, cucumbers in your salad, strawberry shortcake for desert, or tequila at your weekend party. Your garden would be barren of flowers as well. Perfumes, spices, and medicines would be scarce.

Worldwide, according to www.pollinator.org, approximately 1,000 plants grown for food, beverages, fibers, spices, and medicines need to be pollinated by animals in order to produce the goods on which we depend.

Let's start in your back yard. The poster child of pollination is the honey bee. Watch as a honey bee hovers over a flower, comes in for a landing, and taxis in for the goods. The goods, in this case, are nectar. In the process of reaching the protein-rich drink, the honey bee gets lavishly dusted with pollen. When sufficiently tanked with nectar, the bee takes off and finds another floral runway, makes a landing, and repeats the process. Thus pollen is transferred from one flower to another to another.

Honey bee pollination contributes well over $14 billion dollars to agribusiness in the United States. According to the American Beekeeping Federation, some crops, including blueberries and cherries, are 90 percent dependent on honey bee pollination; one crop, almonds, depends entirely on the honey bee for pollination at bloom time. Considered a generalist (in other words, not too picky in its choice of plants to pollinate), a honey bee is just as likely to be buzzing around your flower garden as an apple orchard or a soybean field.

The economic prominence of the European honey bee notwithstanding, there is a host of native bees critical to pollination of indigenous plants as well as domesticated crops. Bumblebees, familiar native navigators in Illinois airspace, pollinate columbine, jewelweed and black-eyed Susan in the woods and prairie. They also pollinate cantaloupe, cucumbers, squash, persimmons, apples, cotton, and dozens of other crops.

Flies are pretty cool pollinators. Despite the yuck factor of flies, some species are linked to the delicious pleasures in your life. Take the midge, a form of fly, and its partnership with the cocoa tree in the tropics. Cocoa fruit are the source of the delectable indulgence called chocolate. Cocoa flowers are small and white and face down, explained Beatrix Moisset in "The Midge and the Chocolate Lover." The reason for all this is that they attract tiny flies, known as midges. The midges are ordinarily attracted to fungus and cocoa flowers smell somewhat mushroomy, too. In essence, for the cocoa tree to bear fruit, first it has to be pollinated by midges. No midges, no chocolate. So, next time you bite into a Hershey bar, thank a midge.

Many flies that are attracted to rotting meat pollinate flowers that have co-evolved with these insects to mimic carrion. Our spring-flowering red trillium, for example, attracts flies by sporting maroon carrion-colored flowers with putrid scents. Visiting one alluring flower to another, the flies transfer pollen.

Moths, too, are prominent pollinators. Many moths are on the night shift and are specialized to visit blossoms that open at dusk and into the night. If you're growing four o'clock plants in your garden, watch them as evening falls and the moths arrive. With their blossoms fully open at night, the four o'clocks entice moths to feed on their sweet nectar. In the process of their nightly barhopping, the moths transfer pollen from flower to flower.

There are quite a few diurnal, or daytime, moths, too. You may see moths that are dead ringers for hummingbirds hovering around blossoms on a sunny day. These are known as hummingbird moths, sphinx moths, or clearwings.

Not to be outdone by their invertebrate impostors, ruby-throated hummingbirds are beautiful (if not pugnacious) pollinators in gardens and natural areas. As many as 19 species of plants found in the eastern United States have co-evolved with hummingbirds, according to fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators. These diminutive birds imbibe nectar from red salvia flowers in your garden, scarlet beebalm and wild bergamot.

There is a direct relationship between the shape of the flower (usually tubular) and the length of the hummingbird's bill. The hummingbird laps up nectar by flicking its long, forked tongue deep within a flower at rates up to ten times per second. It forages while hovering airborne, inadvertently collecting pollen on its feathers and bill before darting off to its next meal.

Pollination by mammals is rare in our area. Bats of the desert Southwest and the tropics, however, are well known for their role as pollinators. Arizona, New Mexico and Texas are home to bats that pollinate the tequila-producing agave and the iconic saguaro of the southwestern desert.

The champion pollinators in terms of sheer numbers are beetles. These insects pollinate an astounding number of plants - 88 percent of the 240,000 species of flowering plants worldwide. Beetles were among the first insects to visit flowers and they remain essential pollinators today, according to fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators. They are especially important pollinators for ancient species such as magnolias and spicebush.

The story of pollination is as old as the evolution of insects and flowering plants.

Pollinators and their counterparts, the pollinated, are essential to life on earth. A plethora of pollinators keeps ecosystems running on a global and local scale. As you harvest tomatoes this summer, gather flowers for table decorations, relax on your deck with a shot of tequila, bite into a chocolate bar, or buy produce at the farmers market thank a pollinator!

• Valerie Blaine is a naturalist for the Forest Preserve District of Kane County. You may reach her at blainevalerie@kaneforest.com.