Bringing back the bees: Pollinator habitat coming to Marshall County

PLYMOUTH, Ind. --- Keeping the bees and butterflies in Marshall County: That’s the goal of one local group who’s using a $2,5000 grant to fund a pollinator habitat.

An empty field behind the Pioneer Seed plant off of US-30 will soon be transformed into 2.5 acres of flowers.

Marshall County Soil & Water is partnering with Pioneer Seed to make it happen. Their hope is that providing pollinators with a food source in Marshall County will help them stay here.  

“The pollinators are things like butterflies and honeybees,” Alice Ballard said, who helped make the project happen. “The pollinator habitat will provide nectar, pollen for them as they’re here. Right now the area is just a grassy area and we hope to convert it to flowers.”

Deborah Palmer from Marshall County Soil & Water called this an important project.

“I wrote a grant application asking to help fund this pollinator habitat so we were awarded $2,500 to do that!” Palmer said.

The habitat is needed because pollinators like bees and butterflies are dying without food sources.

“As everyone probably knows, pollinators have been in the news a lot,” Palmer said. “Talking about the decline in monarch butterflies and pollinators in general.”

The habitat will give pollinators a reason to stay in Marshall County and in turn help with the pollination of crops like the blueberries.

“If they don’t have a food source while they’re waiting on that blueberry to bloom, if they don’t have a habitat then they might not be here,” Ballard said.

Planting will begin sometime this spring and the first year will be all about blooming. By the second and third year, they expect the empty field off US-30 to be in bloom and at its full potential.

“It’s going to be full of blooms and it’s going to be full of life,” Palmer said. “It’s gonna have bees and butterflies and it’s just going to be beautiful.”