The Spring Bulb Conspiracy: $1 Billion Worth of Empty Flowers

Speaker A:

Welcome back to Secret Pollinators. I'm your host, Kelly Parks, and today I'm going to ruin your spring garden.

Well, sorry. Well, no, not. Not really sorry. I'm really not sorry.

Anyways, every fall, gardeners across America walk into garden centers and pick up bags of tulip bulbs and daffodil bulbs and hyacinth bulbs,

all kinds of bulbs.

Maybe a pollinator friendly bulb mix with a happy bee on the label.

And then they plant them.

And spring comes and the flowers bloom.

The gardener feels really good. They think, wow, I'm helping the bees. I'm doing something really good.

Well, here's the problem.

Most of those flowers are useless to pollinators.

And some are worse than useless.

They're toxic.

And the entire industry that sells them,

well,

they know this.

The Netherlands ships 1 billion flower bulbs to the United States every single year.

One billion.

And a huge percentage of those bulbs grow into flowers that produce no pollen,

no nectar,

or both.

Zero pollen, zero nectar.

So we're planting empty flowers by the billions.

And to me, that is deeply concerning and tragic, actually.

So this is the spring bulb conspiracy,

the one billion bulb pipeline.

So let's start with scale, because most people really have no idea just how big this industry actually is.

It's kind of mind blowing.

The Netherlands produces between 8.5 and 9 billion flower bulbs every year.

That country alone accounts for 70% of the world's bulb production and 90% of the trade the global tulip market is worth.

Are you sitting down?

$6.29 billion?

The Dutch ship 1 billion bulbs to the United States annually under something called the pre clearance program.

Most of them are tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, and crocuses.

So if you ever bought a bag of tulips,

you know, or hyacinth's at a garden center or,

I don't know, hardware store, a big box retailer. In the fall,

there's an extremely good chance those bulbs came out of a 28,000 hectare bulb production zone in Holland.

It's mind blowing.

And here's the thing that nobody puts on the packaging.

The vast majority of those bulbs,

well,

they're not original wild species.

These are highly bred hybrids selected over generations for one visual appeal.

Bigger blooms,

brighter colors,

double petals,

symmetrical shapes.

Flowers that look perfect in a photograph for Instagram.

And every time plant breeders select for those traits,

they're unselecting for something else.

Pollen,

nectar and scent.

The biological signals and rewards that flowers evolved to attract. Pollinators,

well, those got bred out because they didn't matter to the people buying the bulbs.

I guess that's us. It's really sad.

So basically, the tulips you plant in your yard are basically pollinator theater.

And that's tragic.

What breeders quietly took away.

I'd like to explain what I mean when I say bred out.

Wild tulips, the original tulip species from Central Asia and Turkey are pollinated by wild bees.

They have pollen and they reproduce by seed,

and bees actually visit them.

But almost none of the tulips sold today are wild tulips. Almost all commercial tulips are sterile hybrids.

They reproduce only through bulb division,

not seeds, not pollen, not pollinators.

So the plant doesn't need bees anymore because the generic pressure to keep producing good pollen and nectar pretty much disappeared.

And here's the kicker.

Most people don't even know this.

Tulips don't even produce nectar to begin with. Even the wild ones, they rely on pollen as the only reward.

So when you breed a sterile double petal tulip with a reduced pollen production,

you basically created a flower that offers a hungry early spring bee absolutely nothing.

And daffodils, well, they're even worse.

Daffodils contain a group of compounds that I think I need hooked on phonics to pronounce,

but they're alkaloids.

And seriously, there's.

I don't. I don't think I'm smart enough to pronounce them anyways. Every part of the plant has them. The bulb, the stem, the leaves, the flowers. And these alkaloids are why deer won't eat daffodils.

Interesting, isn't it?

And now I know why the deer don't eat my daffodils. They're why the SAP kills other cut flowers if you put them in the same vase.

And they're why you should never plant cut daffodils,

or, excuse me, never plant daffodils next to onions and garlic.

They're also why most bees ignore daffodils completely.

And beekeepers have been writing about this for over a hundred years.

Bees fly right past blooming daffodil patches to get crocuses and willow catkins instead.

You know why? Because the bees know and they've always known.

We're the ones that didn't know the wild daffodil,

the original species,

it does get visited by some bumblebees and long tongued bees.

And the wild narcissus,

the poet's daffodil, has a scent and is visited by moss.

But the showy Yellow trumpet hybrids in your front yard.

The big ruffly doubles,

the pink cup. Designer cultivars,

well,

those are essentially plastic.

And as one beekeeper put it,

they might as well be silk flowers,

because hyacinths, hybrid crocuses, fancy double tulips.

It's the same story they're selected for looks stripped of biology.

The bees who are starving while you're gardening.

And here's why this matters to me so much.

Spring is the hungriest time of year for bees.

Bumblebee queens spend their entire winter underground,

alone, in a state of suspended animation.

And I've talked about this in lots of previous episodes,

they burned through their fat reserves months ago. And when they emerge in early spring,

sometimes when there's still snow on the ground,

they are starving.

I mean, literally starving.

And they have days to find food before they die.

And if they don't,

well,

it's highly problematic, because if they don't survive, they can't start a new colony.

Every queen who doesn't find enough food in March or April is a colony that doesn't exist in June.

Solitary mining bees, mason bees,

and early andrena species.

It's the same situation.

They emerge from winter dormancy desperate for pollen.

Some of them are specialists,

and they spend their entire life cycle tied to a flower called Spring Beauty,

a tiny native woodland wildflower.

And if Spring Beauty isn't blooming when that bee emerges,

the bee dies.

There are no second chances.

And what are gardeners offering them?

A yard full of double tulips and trumpet daffodils that produce absolutely nothing, no benefit to the bees.

And the cruelest part is that gardeners genuinely think they're helping because of mass advertising and marketing.

They saw the spring color for pollinators sign at the garden center. They bought the bee friendly mix.

They feel like they did the right thing. We've all done it. I mean, let's be honest.

But the bees flying over that yard are flying over a food desert dressed up in yellow and red.

And I learned that the hard way by watching bees for the last 20 years and watching some of my tulips reproduce by seed.

And that's sort of how I kind of got it, which is a long way around.

And it's also why I keep saying bee conservation isn't just about more flowers.

It's about the right flowers,

the bulbs that actually work.

Okay, well,

I've basically torched your spring garden,

so now let me help you rebuild it.

Here are the bulbs that actually feed bees,

wild bees, native bees,

and plant these and you become part of the solution, which is what we desperately need.

Snow crocus.

These are the species of crocuses, not the giant Dutch hybrids.

Bumblebee queens love them. Honeybees love them too. They bloom when almost nothing else is blooming. And on a warm February or March afternoon,

you'll see bees crawling deep into the cups loaded with pollen.

Plant a thousand of them under your lawn.

And I'm serious. I mean, I'm being totally serious.

They'll naturalize,

they spread,

and they save bee lives.

There's winter aconite, a tiny yellow buttercup like flower that blooms even earlier than crocuses and sometimes pushes through the snow. Bees also adore those snowdrops. We've all heard of snowdrops.

They produce both pollen and nectar in sunny spots. And they're very easy to naturalize.

Glory of the snow.

Those are blue.

They're early. And they're a bee magnet. Both wild bees and honeybees.

Siberian squill.

Stunning blue carpets. They're an early bloomer. They support bees. And hoverflies. I just love hoverflies too.

Grape hyacinth is probably my very, very favorite. They're fragrant, bee friendly and they spread like crazy. And they're just absolutely gorgeous in your lawn and species. Tulips.

These are the real tulips, not the hybrids. They're smaller and they actually have functional reproductive parts.

And wild bees,

native bees,

you know, they visit them wild daffodils.

Well, they're small, fragrant. They're the originals. Skip the giant hybrids and plant these instead.

And if you really want to do right,

plant the native spring ephemerals alongside the bulbs. Spring beauty.

Virginia bluebells, Dutchman's breeches,

trout lily and bloodroot.

These are the plants that co evolve with North American native bees.

They are the food those bees were built for.

Your fridge moment.

Here's what I hope and pray that you will take away from this episode.

The flower bulb industry.

While they've spent decades optimizing flowers for are human eyes.

Bigger blooms, brighter colors, more dramatic shapes.

And the advertising and marketing has spent decades convincing gardeners that those flowers are good for nature.

Both of those things can be true at the same time.

Beautiful and ecologically empty.

That's a fact.

But you don't have to give up your tulips. And you don't have to feel guilty about the daffodils your grandmother planted.

But this spring or next fall, when you walk into the garden center, look at the bulb display with new eyes.

Skip the bag with the cartoon B on it and look for the word species or wild or the Latin binomial in small print.

Those are the real ones.

So basically, I'm asking you to read labels just like you would for your food.

A single packet of species crocuses does more for pollinators than a hundred giant hybrid tulips.

A clump of wild daffodils does more than a designer cultivar with 14 petals.

The bees, well, they're not impressed by ruffles.

They're impressed by food.

And if you're a garden center owner listening to this,

please, please, please, stalk native species,

label them clearly.

Tell your customers the truth.

There's a real demand for this,

and you can be the one who delivers it and helps us save the bees and make a difference.

Okay, I know that this episode might sting a little.

I mean, I understand.

But here's the thing about secrets.

Once you know them, you can't unknow them.

And once you know what your spring garden is really doing or really not doing,

you have the power to change it.

And I sure hope you will. And I sure hope and pray that you'll share this with your friends and your garden centers,

because I believe that education is empowerment and the best ways that I can think of to help our wild and native bee populations.

And thank you so much for listening to the secret pollinators.

Until next time,

leave the leaves,

let it be wild,

and plant the species,

you know, the bulbs that actually produce pollen.