Gardeners hoping to get more yield from their plants are likely aware they need to encourage pollinators, such as bees, insects, birds, and even wind or water.
Pollination is the process of moving pollen (male) from the anther in one flower to the stigma (female) in another flower of the same species. The act of successful pollination produces fertile seeds. According to Gardening experts at the University of Saskatchewan, while some plants are self-pollinating, almost all flowering plants need to be pollinated by a winged creature.
Flowering plants are attractive to all pollinators.
"And that's through no accident. That's through 140 million years of evolution. So it benefits those flowers to have visitors and a broad assortment of visitors," said Dr. James Tansey, the Provincial Entomologist with the Ministry of Agriculture. "So that can include butterflies and moths, a large number of fly species, wasps and bees, and even male mosquitoes can be important to pollinators and will visit flowers."
He said both male and female mosquitos seek out nectar for feeding and for energy, "but the females are looking for that blood meal to be able to contribute to the next generation, so it's nothing personal."
Dr. Tansey also recommends allowing the larvae of herbivore insects to consume some foliage to help them eventually get to their pollinator status.
"People should be willing to let insects do a little bit of damage, particularly to flowering plants, and reason being is a lot of these pollinators will of course have the larval stages, and those things need to get by on their food," he explained.
"If you do have ornamental plants that are suffering a little bit of damage, be patient with that. Unless the plants are being completely eaten away, just tolerate a little bit of damage. You'll benefit those more charismatic adult flying insects."
He noted that a little bit of leaf damage is generally not going to be detrimental to the plant.
While adult insects, at the flying stage, are general in their feeding preferences on flowers, some are specialists.
"There are some really close co-evolutionary relationships. Figs is an example where they're utterly reliant on a little wasp. Yucca is another example, where they're completely reliant on one species of moth, and some orchid species are completely reliant on specific insects. But for the most part, pollinators are pretty generalist, but the herbivores, the ones that are actually consuming the plant, those can be very specialized, and a lot of this has to do with host plant defenses."
Tansey explained that this is due to the angiosperm explosion, which took place 140 million years ago.
"Flowering plant numbers went through the roof and insect numbers went through the roof in response to it. So you got this specialization of host plants and the specialization of herbivore and these co-evolutionary arms races over chemistry. So that's a big part of the specialization for these animals."
As for which flowering plants will attract more pollinators, he recommends checking out the resources available on the Native Plant Society of Saskatchewan's website.
"There are some excellent photos of all kinds of insects in Saskatchewan, and I really encourage people to take a look at that just to get an idea of the diversity of the insect fauna here. We've got some really cool insects in this province."
Tansey also encourages people to take their kids out and do some dip netting in sloughs, to see what kinds of diversity can be found in Saskatchewan's freshwater systems. This means scooping up and examining things like dragonfly nymphs and other species, but returning the animals back to the water, without harming them in the process.