Pollinator Week

         It’s Pollinator Week, so let’s celebrate with block prints of some of our world’s wonderful pollinators.  I’ll start right off with a bang with this beautiful, bright image of a variety of bees and butterflies visiting a variety of flowers.  This piece by Kate Heiss took seven blocks and is full of summery color.  Butterflies are particularly beloved, being beautiful and gentle.  They are often considered symbolic of the soul and of rebirth.  How fitting, then, that their pollination helps ensure the rebirth of the plants they visit.  If you want to support butterflies, you should grow not only the flowers they pollinate, but also the plants on which they lay their eggs (such as milkweed for monarchs.)

        Another piece by Heiss, using only one block, shows a wonderful graphic quality.  This one reminds us of the incredible importance of bees for pollination.  It shows sunflowers (with wonderful patterns) in the foreground, while the background shows a cultivated field.  Scientists estimate that about a third of the food we eat (as many as three quarters of the different crop species) are dependent on pollination by bees.  So yes, you should be concerned that many species of bees are in serious decline.  Please lay off the pesticides in your yard, for the sake of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators - and for the sake of the humans who like

to eat the food they pollinate!

        Up next is a pollinator from the Americas that everyone loves: the hummingbird.  Each block of this two-block linocut by Alynn Guerra is printed with a color gradation for a fiery red palette that any hummingbird would love.  Where I live we get only one species of hummingbird, and they always seem like a wonderful gift.  Where there are many species you can see the evidence of co-evolution between the flowers and the hummingbirds’ bills.

        A less well-known pollinator is the bat, mostly the fruit-eating bats of tropical and desert areas.  (All the bats in my area are insect-eaters.)  Still, over 500 species of plants rely on bats, including bananas and mangos, so don’t underestimate their services to flowering plants.  Here’s a two-layer reduction linocut by Emīls Salmiņš, showing three bats feasting on the berries that probably wouldn’t even be there without the bats’ pollination.

        And finally, here’s one of my own rubber block prints, featuring another night-time pollinator: the moth.  A study in 2023 found that moths were actually more efficient pollinators than bees, carrying more pollen, and visiting a wider variety of species.  On the other hand, they pollinate fewer vital food crops.  A number of our beloved flowers are pollinated by moths, though, including morning glories, honeysuckle, monarda, and evening primrose.

        In addition, wasps, flies, beetles, other birds, and small mammals can also provide flowering plants with that vital pollination.  Never forget that nature is a wildly complex, interconnected, finely tuned machine, and every time we mess up part of it (like using all those pesticides on foods crops - or your lawn), we cause unintended and sometimes disastrous consequences.  Pollinator Week is a reminder that we need to protect these creatures, both the beautiful beloved ones and the less flashy ones.  And of course it’s also a good excuse for block prints.  (To see the collection of pollinators I posted way back in 2013, see that Pollinator Week post.)

[Pictures: Poppies and Pollinators, linocut by Kate Heiss (Image from VK Gallery);

Sunflower and Bees, linocut by Heiss (Image from VK Gallery);

Hummingbird, linocut print by Alynn Guerra (Image from Red Hydrant Press);

Bats, linocut reduction print by Emīls Salmiņš (Image from Two Lovers Printmaking);

Wee Hours, rubber block print by AEGNydam (Image from NydamPrints.com).]