Are Busy Roads Harming Bees and Other Pollinators?
Can bees thrive beside busy roads? Discover how traffic, pollution, heat and drought could affect pollen and the pollinators that depend on it in our towns and cities.
What happens to bees and other pollinating insects when the flowers they depend on grow beside busy roads?
Stephanie Glendinning, a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, is researching how the pressures of urban life affect pollinators. Her work looks at factors including pollution, heat and drought, with a particular focus on how these stresses could affect the quality of pollen.
In this video, Stephanie explains field experiments comparing wildflower patches near roads with different levels of traffic. By studying the insects visiting these sites, she hopes to better understand how road pollution and other environmental pressures could affect pollinators living in our towns and cities.
Pollen is an important food source for bees and their young, but we still have much to learn about how pollution changes its quality and what this could mean for insect populations.
Stephanie also discusses sharing her research through Pint of Science, which brings researchers and the public together in informal venues. She hopes her work could eventually help inform urban conservation and decisions about where we create wildflower habitats to give pollinators the best chance to thrive.
Credits
- Researcher: Stephanie Glendinning (Grantham Scholar at the University of Sheffield)
- Video Production: Natalie Heasman Tree (Student at the University of Sheffield)
