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Connecting gardens to gardens
for pollinators
and connecting neighbors to neighbors for community
Check out our interactive Buzzway map here!
--- To get on the Buzzway map ---
- OR -
Scan this QR code
using the camera on your mobile device to access the Buzzway survey .
Click here for a printable copy of the Rogue Buzzway Project brochure.
The Rogue Buzzway Project is mapping pollinator-friendly landscapes so that we can easily see the pollinator corridors throughout the Rogue Valley. These corridors provide safe havens for butterflies, bumble bees, native bees, honey bees, hummingbirds, and other pollinators.
Pollinators are vitally important --
1 out of 3 bites of food we eat, and
3/4 of the world’s flowering plants exist because of insect and animal pollinators.
Pollinator Project Rogue Valley envisions safe, healthy, and thriving pollinator habitats for every community.
The best way to help pollinators and other insects survive and thrive is by providing healthy habitat. Pesticide-free gardens and landscapes planted with nectar-rich flowers and native plants provide food year round.
The Buzzway Project will:
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Identify existing pollinator-friendly parcels and locate pollinator corridors and islands
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Identify areas that lack pollinator-friendly plantings
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Educate and inspire the community to expand the quantity, quality, and variety
of pollinator habitats -
Improve local food production by supporting and building a thriving pollinator population
A Pollinator-Friendly Landscape Provides:
1. Forage - Flowering plants blooming continuously from early spring to early winter
2. Water (for bees) or mud (for butterflies) - river, spring, seep, or stream, or shallow,
pebble lined dish, bird bath or other water
feature
3. Habitat - Untended or wild areas with bare soil, shrubs and native plantings for nesting and overwintering of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators
4. Pesticide Free Areas - Seeds and plants not treated with neonicotinoids, and minimal to no use of herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides.
Bella the Bumble Bee says -- Are you on the No Spray List for Jackson County Vector Control? Join other residents who are keeping their property free from Deltamethrin, the pesticide 'fogged' for adult mosquitos --- known to be toxic to bees and aquatic life!
Bee part of the Rogue Buzzway Project!
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Add your pollinator landscape to the map
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Invite your friends and neighbors to create a pollinator garden
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Help with community outreach projects
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Schedule a presentation for your organization, school, or business
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Support the project with a donation - check, cash or donate through our secure website
Pollinators are as important as sunlight, rain, and soil fertility for the health of both human lives and natural ecosystems.
As we continue to lose more natural landscape to development, and amid reports of steep declines in the numbers of bees and other insects worldwide, it’s urgent that we act now to save them.
Best idea? Go Native! For over 170 million years, hundreds of pollinator species in Southern Oregon haveco-evolved with our native trees, shrubs, and flowers. Native plants provide the best sustenance and habitat for our native pollinators.
Excerpt from early Buzzway map, Ashland, 2017
Much gratitude to Ollie Bucolo, and Dr. Jamie Tramell and his Geographic Information Systems (GIS) students at Southern Oregon University for their work to create the Rogue Buzzway map!
Interested in learning more about pollinator corridors?
Two important quotes from this study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology: "Privately owned residential gardens or yards (hereafter referred to as ‘gardens’) are a particularly valuable type of urban green space for insect pollinators as they are often (but not always) actively managed by gardeners to provide ornamental displays of flowering plants, which provide pollinators with food in the form of nectar and pollen."
"Being mobile, insect pollinators have the potential to take advantage of the nectar supplied by gardens despite their patchy distribution in fragmented urban landscapes, but differences in diet, larval requirements, dispersal capability and nesting behaviour among taxa will affect the composition of pollinator communities that can be supported."
This article from Science Daily confirms that connectivity makes a difference for pollinator populations, as well as for plants, birds and other wildlife.
"Our study suggests that these corridors do help in connecting populations, and theoretically they should help sustain networks of populations existing in increasingly fragmented landscapes," Tewksbury said.
This study informs us how important it is for the monarchs' survival to have a continuous and contiguous supply of milkweed available. And that the best way to grow milkweed is in large patches or along the edges of the garden, to make it easy for the egg-laying monarch to identify the plant and to reduce their availability to some predators.
This article from The Guardian shares the good news from research published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, confirming that gardens and landscapes in urban areas are crucial for the health and longevity of pollinator species, and in fact are "pollinator ‘hotspots’."
Allotment: a small piece of ground in or just outside a town that a person rents for growing vegetables, fruits, or flowers, like a community garden.
This article from The Xerces Society explains that even small-scale gardens, thoughtfully planted and protected from pesticides, scattered amongst homes and businesses, will add up to meaningful habitat.