Weed Free - Contract Pesticide Application Services

Making a Buzz about Bumblebees on Golf Courses

A new project designed to reverse the desperate plight of bumblebees and pollinating insects in the UK, by restoring valuable new habitats on golf courses, is being pioneered by Syngenta and the STRI. The initial pilot project of Operation Pollinator is now running on four selected courses, to provide valuable information on the best management techniques.

Operation Pollinator aims to demonstrate that golf and the environment can co-exist. Simon Elsworth, Syngenta Turf Manager, believes golf courses could provide essential sanctuaries for bumblebees and other beneficial insect species. "Bumblebees play a crucial role as natures' pollinator, but they are in serious decline and need our help now. Helping to resurrect bumblebee populations will help to prove that golf courses can be managed in harmony with the environment."

Weed Control in Golf Course Roughs?

Greenkeepers are being encouraged to introduce pollinator schemes to their golf courses on the back of their success on agricultural land.

Delegates at the Turf Science Live event in Bingley, Yorkshire, last week were talked through the benefits of transforming their roughs into pollinator schemes. The project started 10 years ago and has developed through various guises, such as the Buzz Project and Operation Bumblebee.

Syngenta Turf and landscape technical manager Dr Simon Watson explained: "The project has now become Operation Pollinator and, building on its success, we are hoping to expand it across Europe. Our goals are to mimic what we have done in agriculture and try to bring in an agronomic solution for greenkeepers."

Trial pollinator schemes were launched at the Sports Turf Research Institute by turfgrass protection head Dr Ruth Mann. "It's such a good idea and well established in agriculture," she said.

"We want to have flowering species that go through the whole of the summer so that the insects have food the whole way through. You are not looking for plants coming back each year, you are looking for seed coming back. This is in the process of being written up and hopefully that will give it some weight to show it really works."

Controlling grasses amongst Heather on a Golf Course

Anyone who doubts the importance of golf courses in the fight to preserve our natural heritage should consider the plight of one plant.

Heather, home of some of our most vulnerable and endangered species, the Smooth Snake, Slow Worm, Sand Lizard, Wood Lark and Night Jar, in the south, and both the Red and Black Grouse in the north, was, 100 years ago, so prolific on these islands, that we hosted two thirds of the total European resource. Nowadays, according to Bob Taylor, Senior Ecologist to the Sports Turf Research Institute, the plant’s presence has become severely fragmented, especially in the south.